CONTENTS
PAGE
A HERMIT'S NOTES ON THOREAU i
/ THE SoiyiTUDE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE . 22
J THE ORIGINS OF HAWTHORNE AND POE . . 51
THE INFLUENCE OF EMERSON .... 71
THE SPIRIT OF CARLYLE 85
THE SCIENCE OF ENGLISH VERSE . . . 103
ARTHUR SYMONS : THE Two ILLUSIONS . . 122
THE EPIC OF IRELAND . V j . . N . .147
Two POETS OF THE IRISH MOVEMENT . . .177
TOLSTOY; OR, THE ANCIENT FEUD BETWEEN
PHILOSOPHY AND ART 193
THE RELIGIOUS GROUND OF HUMANITARIANISM . 225
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
A HERMIT'S NOTES ON THOREAU
NEAR the secluded village of Shelburne that
lies along the peaceful valley of the Androscoggin,
I took upon myself to live two years as a hermit
after a mild Epicurean fashion of my own. Three
maiden aunts wagged their heads ominously; my
nearest friend inquired cautiously whether there
was any taint of insanity in the family; an old
grey-haired lady, a veritable saint who had not
been soured by her many deeds of charity, admon-
ished me on the utter selfishness and godlessness
of such a proceeding. But I clung heroically to
my resolution. Summer tourists in that pleasant
valley may still see the little red house among tKe
pines, empty now, I believe; and I dare say
gaudy coaches still draw up at the door, as they
used to do, when the gaudier bonnets and hats
exchanged wondering remarks on the cabalistic
inscription over the lintel, or spoke condescend-
ingly to the great dog lying on the steps. As for
the hermit within, having found it impossible to
2 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
educe any meaning from the tangled habits of
mankind while he himself was whirled about
in the imbroglio, he had determined to try the
efficacy of undisturbed meditation at a distance.
So deficient had been his education that he was
actually better acquainted with the aspirations
and emotions of the old dwellers on the Ganges
than with those of the modern toilers by the
Hudson or the Potomac. He had been deafened
by the ' ' indistinguishable roar ' ' of the streets,
and could make no sense of the noisy jargon of
the market place. But shall it be confessed ?
although he discovered many things during his
contemplative sojourn in the wilderness, and
learned that the attempt to criticise and not to
create literature was to be his labour in this world,
nevertheless he returned to civilisation as ignor-
ant, alas, of its meaning as when he left it.
However, it is not my intention to justify the
saintly old lady's charge of egotism by telling the
story of my exodus to the desert; that, perhaps,
may come later and at a more suitable time. I
wish now only to record the memories of one per-
fect day in June, when woods and mountains were
as yet a new delight.
The fresh odours of morning were still swaying
in the air when I set out on this particular day;
and my steps turned instinctively to the great pine
forest, called the Cathedral Woods, that filled the
valley and climbed the hill slopes behind my
house. There, many long roads that are laid
THOREAU 3
down in no map wind hither and thither among
the trees, whose leafless trunks tower into the
sky and then meet in evergreen arches overhead.
There,
The tumult of the times disconsolate
never enters, and no noise of the world is heard
save now and then, in winter, the ringing strokes
of the woodchopper at his cruel task. How many
times I have walked those quiet cathedral aisles,
while my great dog paced faithfully on before!
Underfoot the dry, purple-hued moss was stretched
like a royal carpet; and at intervals a glimpse of
the deep sky, caught through an aperture in the
groined roof, reminded me of the other world,
and carried my thoughts still farther from the
desolating memories of this life. Nothing but
pure odours were there, sweeter than cloistral in-
cense; and murmurous voices of the pines, more
harmonious than the chanting of trained choris-
ters; and in the heart of the wanderer nothing
but tranquillity and passionless peace.
Often now the recollection of those scenes comes
floating back upon his senses when, in the wake-
ful seasons of a summer night, he hears the wind
at work among the trees; even in barren city
streets some sound or spectacle can act upon him
as a spell, banishing for a moment the hideous
contention of commerce, and placing him beneath
the restful shadows of the pines. May his under-
standing cease its function, and his heart forget to
feel, when the memory of those days has utterly
4 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
left him and he walks in the world without this
consolation of remembered peace.
Nor can I recollect that my mind, in these
walks, was much called away from contemplation
by the petty curiosities of the herbalist or bird-
lorist, for I am not one zealously addicted to
scrutinising into the minuter secrets of Nature. It
never seemed to me that a flower was made sweeter
by knowing the construction of its ovaries, or as-
sumed a new importance when I learned its trivial
or scientific name. The wood thrush and the
veery sing as melodiously to the uninformed as to
the subtly curious. Indeed, I sometimes think a
little ignorance is wholesome in our communion
with Nature, until we are ready to part with her
altogether. She is feminine in this as in other
respects, and loves to shroud herself in illusions,
as the Hindus taught in their books. For they
called her May, the very person and power of
deception, whose sway over the beholder must
end as soon as her mystery is penetrated.
Dear as the sound of the wood thrush's note
still is to my ears, something of charm and allure-
ment has gone from it since I have become inti-
mate with the name and habits of the bird. As
a child born and reared in the city, that wild,
ringing call was perfectly new and strange to me
when, one early dawn, I first heard it during a
visit to the Delaware Water Gap. To me, whose
ears had grown familiar only with the rumble of
paved streets, the sound was like a reiterated un-
THOREAU 5
earthly summons inviting me from my narrow
prison existence out into a wide and unexplored
world of impulse and adventure. Long after-
wards I learned the name of the songster whose
note had made so strong an impression on my
childish senses, but still I associate the song with
the grandiose scenery, with the sheer forests and
streams and the rapid river of the Water Gap. I
was indeed almost a man though the confession
may sound incredible in these days before I again
heard the wood thrush's note, and my second ad-
venture impressed me almost as profoundly as the
first. In the outer suburbs of the city where my
home had always been, I was walking one day
with a brother, when suddenly out of a grove of
laurel oaks sounded, clear and triumphant, the
note which I remembered so well, but which had
come to have to my imagination the unreality and
mystery of a dream of long ago. Instantly my
heart leapt within me. "It is the fateful sum-
mons once more!" I cried; and, with my com-
panion who was equally ignorant of bird-lore, I
ran into the grove to discover the wild trumpeter.
That was a strange chase in the fading twilight,
while the unknown songster led us on from tree
to tree, ever deeper into the woods. Many times
we saw him on one of the lower boughs, but could
not for a long while bring ourselves to believe
that so wondrous a melody should proceed from
so plain a minstrel. And at last, when we had
satisfied ourselves of his identity, and the night
6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
had fallen, we came out into the road with a
strange solemnity hanging over us. Our ears had
been opened to the unceasing harmonies of crea-
tion, and our eyes had been made aware of the
endless drama of natural life. We had been
initiated into the lesser mysteries; and if the
sacred pageantry was not then, and never was
to be, perfectly clear to our understanding, the
imagination was nevertheless awed and purified.
If the knowledge and experience of years have
made me a little more callous to these deeper in-
fluences, at least I have not deliberately closed
the door to them by incautious prying. Perhaps
a long course of wayward reading has taught me
to look upon the world with eyes quite different
from those of the modern exquisite searchers into
Nature. I remember the story of Prometheus,
and think his punishment is typical of the penalty
that falls upon those who grasp at powers and
knowledge not intended for mankind, some
nemesis of a more material loneliness and a more
barren pride torturing them because they have
turned from human knowledge to an alien and
forbidden sphere. I^ike Prometheus, they shall
in the end cry out in vain :
O air divine, and O swift-winged winds !
Ye river fountains, and thou myriad-twinkling
Laughter of ocean waves ! O mother earth !
And thou, O all-discerning orb o' the sun !
To you, I cry to you ; behold what I,
A god, endure of evil from the gods.
THOREAU 7
Nor is the tale of Prometheus alone in teaching
this lesson of prudence, nor was Greece the only
land of antiquity where reverence was deemed
more salutary than curiosity. The myth of the
veiled Isis passed in those days from people to
people, and was everywhere received as a symbol
of the veil of illusion about Nature, which no man
might lift with impunity. And the same idea
was, if anything, intensified in the Middle Ages.
The common people, and the Church as well,
looked with horror on such scholars as Pope
Gerbert, who was thought, for his knowledge of
Nature, to have sold himself to the devil; and on
such discoverers as Roger Bacon, whose wicked
searching into forbidden things cost him fourteen
years in prison. And even in modern times did
not the poet Blake say : * * I fear Wordsworth loves
nature, and nature is the work of the Devil. The
Devil is in us as far as we are nature " ? It has
remained for an age of scepticism to substitute
investigation for awe. After all, can any course
of study or open-air pedagogics bring us into real
communion with the world about us? I fear
much of the talk about companionship with Na-
ture that pervades our summer life is little better
than cant and self-deception, and he best under-
stands the veiled goddess who most frankly admits
her impenetrable secrecy. The peace that conies
to us from contemplating the vast panorama spread
out before us is due rather to the sense of a great
passionless power entirely out of our domain than
8
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
to any real intimacy with the hidden deity. It
was John Woolman, the famous New Jersey
Quaker, who wrote, during a journey through
the wilderness of Pennsylvania: " In my travel-
ling on the road, I often felt a cry rise from the
centre of my mind, thus, *O L,ord, I am a stranger
on the earth, hide not thy face from me.' "
But I forget that I am myself travelling on the
road; and all this long disquisition is only a chap-
ter of reminiscences, due to the multitudinous
singing of the thrushes on this side and that, as
we I and my great dog trod the high cathedral
aisles. After a while the sound of running water
came to us above the deeper diapason of the pines,
and, turning aside, we clambered down to a brook
which we had already learned to make the ter-
minus of our walks. Along this stream we had
discovered a dozen secret nooks where man and
dog might lie or sit at ease, and to-day I stretched
myself on a cool, hollow rock, with my eyes look-
ing up the long, leafy chasm of the brook. Just
above my couch the current was dammed by a
row of mossy boulders, over which the waters
poured with a continual murmur and plash. My
head was only a little higher than the pool beyond
the boulders, and, lying motionless, I watched the
flies weaving a pattern over the surface of the
quiet water, and now and then was rewarded by
seeing a greedy trout leap into the sunlight to
capture one of the winged weavers. Surely, if
there is any such thing as real intimacy with
THOREAU 9
Nature, it is in just such secluded spots as this;
for the grander scenes require of us a moral en-
thusiasm which can come to the soul only at rare
intervals and for brief moments. From these
chosen mountain retreats, one might send to a
scientist, busy with his books and instruments
and curious to pry into the secret powers of Na-
ture, some such an appeal as this:
Brother, awhile your impious engines leave ;
Nor always seek with flame-compelling wires
Out of the palsied hand of Zeus to reave
His dear celestial fires.
What though he drowse upon a tottering bench,
Forgetful how his random bolts are hurled !
Are you to blame ? or is it yours to quench
The thunders of the world?
Come learn with me through folly to be wise :
Think you by cunning laws of optic lore
To lend the enamelled fields or burning skies
One splendour lacked before?
A wizard footrule to the waves of sound
You lay, hath measure in the song of bird
Or ever in the voice of waters found
One melody erst unheard ?
Ah, for a season close your magic books,
Your rods and crystals in the closet hide ;
I know in covert ways a hundred nooks,
High on the mountain side,
10 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Where through the golden hours that follow noon,
Under the greenwood shadows you and I
May talk of happy lives, until too soon
Night's shadows fold the sky.
And while like incense blown among the leaves
Our fragrant smoke ascends from carven bowl,
We '11 con the lesser wisdom that deceives
The Questioner in the soul,
And laugh to hoodwink where we cannot rout :
Did Bruno of the stubborn heart outbrave,
Or could the mind of Galileo flout
The folly of the Grave ?
So it seemed to me that the lesser wisdom of
quiet content before the face of Nature's mysteries
might be studied in the untrained garden of my
hermitage. But I have been dreaming and moral-
ising on the little life about me and the greater
life of the world too long. So lying near the level
of the still pool I began to read. The volume
chosen was the most appropriate to the time
and place that could be imagined, Thoreau's
Walden; and having entered upon an experiment
not altogether unlike his, I now set myself to
reading the record of his two years of solitude.
I learned many things from that morning's peru-
sal. Several times I had read the Odyssey within
sight of the sea; and the murmur of the waves
on the beach, beating through the rhythm of the
poem, had taught me how vital a thing a book
might be, and how it could acquire a peculiar
THOREAU II
validity from harmonious surroundings; but now
the reading of Thoreau in that charmed and lonely
spot emphasised this commonplace truth in a
special manner. Walden studied in the closet,
and Walden mused over under the trees, by run-
ning water, are two quite different books. And
then, from Thoreau, the greatest by far of our
writers on Nature, and the creator of a new senti-
ment in literature, my mind turned to the long list
of Americans who have left, or are still composing,
a worthy record of their love and appreciation of
the natural world. Our land of multiform activi-
ties has produced so little that is really creative
in literature or art! Hawthorne and Poe, and
possibly one or two others, were masters in them
own field; yet even they chose not quite the high-
est realm for their genius to work in. But in one
subject our writers have led the way and are still
pre-eminent: Thoreau was the creator of a new!
manner of writing about Nature. In its deeper
essence his work is inimitable, as it is the voice
of a unique personality; but in its superficial
aspects it has been taken up by a host of living
writers, who have caught something of his
method, even if they lack his genius and single-
ness of heart. From these it was an easy transi-
tion to compare Thoreau' s attitude of mind with
that of Wordsworth and the other great poets of
his century who went to Nature for their inspira-
tion, and made Nature-writing the characteristic
note of modern verse. What is it in Thoreau
12 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
that is not to be found in Byron and Shelley and
Wordsworth, not to mention old Izaak Walton,
Gilbert White of Selborne, and a host of others ?
It was a rare treat, as I lay in that leafy covert,
to go over in memory the famous descriptive pass-
ages from these authors, and to contrast their
spirit with that of the book in my hand.
As I considered these matters, it seemed to me
that Thoreau's work was distinguished from that
of his American predecessors and imitators by just
these qualities of awe and wonder which we, in
our communings with Nature, so often cast away.
Mere description, though it may at times have a
scientific value, is after all a very cheap form of
literature; and, as I have already intimated, too
much curiosity of detail is likely to exert a dead-
ening influence on the philosophic and poetic con-
templation of Nature. Such an influence is, as I
believe, specially noticeable at the present time,
and even Thoreau was not entirely free from its
baneful effect. Much of his writing, perhaps the
greater part, is the mere record of observation
and classification, and has not the slightest claim
on our remembrance, unless, indeed, it possesses
some scientific value, which I doubt. Certainly
the parts of his work having permanent interest
are just those chapters where he is less the minute
observer, and more the contemplative philosopher.
Despite the width and exactness of his informa-
tion, he was far from having the truly scientific
spirit; the acquisition of knowledge, with him,
THOREAU 13
was in the end quite subordinate to his interest in
the moral significance of Nature, and the words
he read in her obscure scroll were a language of
strange mysteries, oftentimes of awe. It is a con-
stant reproach to the prying, self-satisfied habits
of small minds to see the reverence of this great-
hearted observer before the supreme goddess he
so loved and studied.
Much of this contemplative spirit of Thoreau is
due to the soul of the man himself, to that per-
sonal force which no analysis of character can ex-
plain. But, besides this, it has always seemed to
me that, more than in any other descriptive writer
of the land, his mind is the natural outgrowth,
and his essays the natural expression, of a feeling
deep-rooted in the historical beginnings of New
England; and this foundation in the past gives a
strength and convincing force to his words that
lesser writers utterly lack. Consider the new life
of the Puritan colonists in the strange surround-
ings of their desert home. Consider the case of
the adventurous Pilgrims sailing from the com-
fortable city of L,eyden to the unknown wilderness
over the sea. As Governor Bradford wrote, * * the
place they had thoughts on was some of those
vast & unpeopled countries of America, which are
frutfull & fitt for habitation, being devroyd of all
civill inhabitants, wher ther are only salvage and
brutish men, which range up and downe, little
otherwise than ye wild beasts of the same." In
these vast and unpeopled countries, where beast
14 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
and bird were strange to the eye, and where
"salvage" men abounded, men who did not
always make the land so * ' fitt ' ' for new inhabit-
ants as Bradford might have desired, it was in-
evitable that the mind should be turned to explore
and report on natural phenomena and on savage
life. It is a fact that some of the descriptions of
sea and land made by wanderers to Virginia and
Massachusetts have a directness and graphic
power, touched occasionally with an element of
wildness, that render them even to-day agreeable
reading.
This was before the time of Rousseau, and
before Gray had discovered the beauty of wild
mountain scenery; inevitably the early American
writers were chiefly interested in Nature as the
home of future colonists, and their books are for
the most part semi-scientific accounts of what
they studied from a utilitarian point of view. But
the dryness of detailed description in the New
World was from the first modified and lighted up
by the wondering awe of men set down in the
midst of the strange and often threatening forces
of an untried wilderness; and this sense of awful
aloofness, which to a certain extent lay dormant
in the earlier writers, did nevertheless sink deep
into the heart of New Kn gland, and when, in the
lapse of time, the country entered into its intellec-
tual renaissance, and the genius came who was
destined to give full expression to the thoughts
of his people before the face of Nature, it was in-
THOREAU 15
evitable that his works should be dominated by
just this sense of poetic mystery.
It is this New World inheritance, moreover,
joined, of course, with his own inexplicable per-
sonality, which must not be left out of account,
that makes Thoreau's attitude toward Nature
something quite distinct from that of the great
poets who just preceded him. There wa^> in him
none of the fiery spirit of the revolution which
caused Byron to mingle hatred of men with en-
thusiasm for the Alpine solitudes. Theresas
none of the passion for beauty and the voluptuous
self-abandonment of Keats; these were not in the
atmosphere he breathed at Concord. He was not
touched with Shelley's unearthly mysticism, nor
had he ever fed
on the aerial kisses
Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses ;
his moral sinews were too stark and strong for
that form of mental dissipation. I,east of all did
he, after the manner of Wordsworth, hear in the
voice of Nature any compassionate plea for the
weakness and sorrow of the downtrodden. Phi-
lanthropy and humanitarian sympathies were to
him a desolation and a woe. " Philanthropy is
almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appre-
ciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated;
and it is our selfishness which overrates it, ' ' he
writes. And again: " The philanthropist too
often surrounds mankind with the remembrance
16 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
of his own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere, and
calls it sympathy." Similarly his reliance on
the human will was too sturdy to be much per-
turbed by the inequalities and sufferings of man-
kind, and his faith in the individual was too
unshaken to be led into humanitarian interest in
the masses. "Alas! this is the crying sin of the
age," he declares, " this want of faith in the
prevalence of a man."
But the deepest and most essential difference is
the lack of pantheistic reverie in Thoreau. It is
this brooding over the universal spirit embodied
in the material world which almost always marks
the return of sympathy with Nature, and which
is particularly noticeable in the writers of the past
century. So Lord Byron, wracked and broken
by his social catastrophes, turns for relief to the
fair scenes of Lake L,eman, and finds in the high
mountains and placid waters a consoling spirit
akin to his own.
Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
he asks; and in the bitterness of his human dis-
appointment he would " be alone, and love Earth
only for its earthly sake." Shelley, too, " mixed
awful talk" with the " great parent," and heard
in her voice an answer to all his vague dreams of
the soul of universal love. No one, so far as I
know, has yet studied the relation between Words-
worth's pantheism and his humanitarian sym-
THOREAU 17
pathies, but we need only glance at his lines on
Tintern Abbey to see how closely the two feelings
were interknit in his mind. It was because he
felt this
sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ;
it was because the distinctions of the human will
and the consequent perception of individual re-
sponsibility were largely absorbed in this dream of
the universal spirit, that he heard in Nature " the
still, sad music of humanity," and reproduced it
so sympathetically in his own song. Of all this
pantheism, whether attended with revolt from re-
sponsibility or languid reverie or humanitarian
dreams, there is hardly a trace in Thoreau. The
memory of man's struggle with the primeval
woods and fields was not so lost in antiquity that
the world had grown into an indistinguishable part
of human life. If Nature smiled upon Thoreau at
times, she was still an alien creature who suc-
cumbed only to his force and tenderness, as she had
before given her bounty, though reluctantly, to
the Pilgrim Fathers. A certain companionship
he had with the plants and wild beasts of the
field, a certain intimacy with the dumb earth; but
he did not seek to merge his personality in their
impersonal life, or look to them for a response to
f8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
his own inner moods; he associated with them as
the soul associates with the body.
More characteristic is his sense of awe, even <Jf
dread, toward the great unsubdued forces of the
world. The loneliness of the mountains such as
they appeared to the early adventurers in a
strange, unexplored country; the repellent lone-
liness of the barren heights frowning down in-
hospitably upon the pioneer who scratched the
soil at their base; the loneliness and terror of the
dark, untrodden forests, where the wanderer
might stray away and be lost forever, where
savage men were more feared than the wild ani-
mals, and where superstition saw the haunt of
the Black Man and of all uncleanness, all this
tradition of sombre solitude made Nature to
Thoreau something very different from the hills
and valleys of Old England. ' ' We have not seen
pure Nature, ' ' he says, * ' unless we have seen her
thus vast and drear and inhuman. . . . Man
was not to be associated with it. It was matter,
vast, terrific, not his Mother Earth that we have
heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,
no, it were being too familiar even to let his
bones lie there, the home, this, of Necessity and
Fate." After reading Byron's invocation to the
Alps as the palaces of Nature; or the ethereal
mountain scenes in Shelley's Alastor, where all
the sternness of the everlasting hills is dissolved
into rainbow hues of shifting light as dainty as
the poet's own soul; or Wordsworth's familiar
THOREAU 19
musings in the vale of Grasmere, if, after these,
we turn to Thoreau's account of the ascent of
Mount Katahdin, we seem at once to be in the
home of another tradition. I am tempted to
quote a few sentences of that account to empha-
sise the point. On the mountain heights, he says
of the beholder:
He is more lone than you can imagine. There is less
of substantial thought and fair understanding in him
than in the plains where men inhabit. His reason is dis-
persed and shadowy, more thin and subtile, like the air.
Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvan-
tage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his
divine faculty. She does not smile on him as in the
plains. She seems to say sternly, Why came ye here
before your time? This ground is not prepared for you.
Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? I have
never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breath-
ing, these rocks for thy neighbours. I cannot pity nor
fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence
to where I am kind.
I do not mean to present the work of Thoreau
as equal in value to the achievement of the great
poets with whom I have compared him, but wish
merely in this way to bring out more definitely
his characteristic traits. Yet if his creative genius
is less than theirs, I cannot but think his attitude
toward Nature is in many respects truer and more
wholesome. Pantheism, whether on the banks
of the Ganges or of the Thames, seems to bring
with it a spreading taint of effeminacy; and from
this the mental attitude of our Concord naturalist
20 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
was eminently free. There is something tonic
and bracing in his intercourse with the rude forces
of the forest; he went to Walden Pond because he
had "private business to transact," not for relax-
ation and mystical reverie. "To be a philoso-
pher," he said, "is not merely to have subtle
thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to
love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a
life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and
trust; ' ' and by recurring to the solitudes of Nature
he thought he could best develop in himself just
these manly virtues. Nature was to him a dis-
cipline of the will as much as a stimulant to the
imagination. He would, if it were possible,
' ' combine the hardiness of the savages with the
intellectualness of the civilised man; " and in this
method of working out the philosophical life we
see again the influence of long and deep-rooted
tradition. To the first settlers, the red man was
as much an object of curiosity and demanded as
much study as the earth they came to cultivate;
their books are full of graphic pictures of savage
life, and it should seem as if now in Thoreau this
inherited interest had received at last its ripest ex-
pression. When he travelled in the wilderness
of Maine, he was as much absorbed in learning
the habits of his Indian guides as in exploring the
woods. He had some innate sympathy or percep-
tion which taught him to find relics of old Indian
life where others would pass them by, and there
is a well-known story of his answer to one who
THOREAU 21
asked him where such relics could be discovered:
he merely stooped down and picked an arrowhead
from the ground.
And withal his stoic virtues never dulled his
sense of awe, and his long years of observation
never lessened his feeling of strangeness in the
presence of solitary Nature. If at times his writ-
ing descends into the cataloguing style of the ordi-
nary naturalist, yet the old tradition of wonder
was too strong in him to be more than temporarily
obscured. Unfortunately, his occasional faults
have become in some of his recent imitators the
staple of their talent; but Thoreau was pre-emi-
nently the poet and philosopher of his school, and
I cannot do better than close these desultory notes
with the quotation of a passage which seems to
me to convey most vividly his sensitiveness to the
solemn mystery of the deep forest :
We heard [he writes in his Chesuncook], come faintly
echoing, or creeping from afar, through the moss-clad
aisles, a dull, dry, rushing sound, with a solid core to it,
yet as if half smothered under the grasp of the luxuriant
and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of a door in some
distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness. If we
had not been there, no mortal had heard it. When we
asked Joe [the Indian guide] in a whisper what it was,
he answered, " Tree fall."
THE SOUTUDE OF NATHANIEL
HAWTHORNE
IN a notable passage, Hawthorne has said of
his own Twice-Told Tales that " the^havejhe
nf flowers that blossomed \r\ too retii
a shade.^.* . . Instead of passion there is L
sentiment. . . . Whether from lack of power
or an unconquerable reserve, the author's touches
have often an effect of tameness; the merriest man
can hardly contrive to laugh at his broadest
humour; the tenderest woman, one would sup-
pose, will hardly shed warm tears at his deepest
pathos. " And a little further on he adds, " The
sketches are not, it is hardly necessary to say,
profound. " Rarely has a writer shown greater
skill in self-criticism than Hawthorne, except
where modesty caused him to lower the truth, and
in ascribing this lack of passion to his works he
has struck what will seem to many the keynote
of their character. When he says, however, that
they are wanting in depth, he certainly errs
through modesty. Many authors, great and
small, display a lack of passion, but perhaps no
other in all the hierarchy of poets who deal with
moral problems has treated these problems, on one
22
HAWTHORNE 23
side at least, so profoundly as our New England
romancer; and it is just this peculiarity of Haw-
thorne, so apparently paradoxical, which gives
him his unique place among writers.
Consider for a moment The Scarlet Letter: the
I pathos of the subject, and the tragic scenes por-
trayed. All the world agrees that here is a
masterpiece of mortal error and remorse; we are
lost in admiration of the author's insight into the
suffering human heart; yet has any one ever shed
a tear over that inimitable romance ? I think not.
The book does not move us to tears; it awakens
no sense of shuddering awe such as follows the
perusal of the great tragedies of literature; it is
not emotional, in the ordinary acceptance of the
word, yet shallow or cold it certainly is not.
In the English Note- Books Hawthorne makes
this interesting comparison of himself with
Thackeray :
Mr. S is a friend of Thackeray [he writes], and,
speaking of the last number of The Newcomes.so
touching that nobody can read it aloud without breaking
down, he mentioned that Thackeray himself had read
it to James Russell Lowell and William Story in a cider
cellar! ... I cannot but wonder at his coolness in
respect to his own pathos, and compare it with my
emotions when I read the last scene of The Scarlet
Letter to my wife, just after writing it, tried to read it,
rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were
tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm.
Why, then, we ask, should we have tears ready
for The Newcomes> and none for The Scarlet
24 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Letter , although the pathos of the latter tale can
so stir the depths of our nature as it did the au-
thor's? What curious trait in his writing, what
strange attitude of the man toward the moral
struggles and agony of human nature, is this that
sets him apart from other novelists ? I purpose
to show how this is due to one dominant motive
running through all his tales, a thought to a
certain extent peculiar to himself, and so per-
sistent in its repetition that, to one who reads
Hawthorne carefully, his works seem to fall to-
gether like the movements of a great symphony
built upon one imposing theme.
I remember, some time ago, when walking
among the Alps, that I happened on a Sunday
morning to stray into the little English church at
Interlaken. The room was pretty well filled with
a chance audience, most of whom no doubt were,
like myself, refugees from civilisation for the sake
of pleasure or rest or health. The minister was a
young sandy-haired Scotsman, with nothing nota-
ble in his aspect save a certain unusual look of
earnestness about the eyes; and I wonder how
many of my fellow listeners still remember that
quiet Sabbath morn, and the sunlight streaming
over all, as white and pure as if poured down from
the snowy peak of the Jungfrau; and how many
of them still at times see that plain little church,
and the simple man standing at the pulpit, and
hear the tones of his vibrating voice. Opening
the Bible he paused a moment, and then read, in
HAWTHORNE 25
accents that faltered a little as if with emotion,
the words, " Kloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani ? ' ' and
then paused again without adding the translation.
I do not know what induced him to choose such
a text, and to preach such a sermon before an
audience of summer idlers; it even seemed to me
that a look of surprise and perturbation stole over
their faces as, in tones tremulous from the start
with restrained passion, he poured forth his singu-
lar discourse. I cannot repeat his words. He
told of the inevitable loneliness that follows man
from the cradle to the grave; he spoke of the lone-
liness that lends the depth of yearning to a
mother's eyes as she bends over her newborn
child, for the soul of the infant has been rent
from her own, and she can never again be united
to what she cherished. It is this sense of indi-
vidual loneliness and isolation, he said, that gives
pathos to lovers' eyes when love has brought
them closest together; it is this that lends aus-
terity to the patriot's look when saluted by the
acclaiming multitude. And you, he cried, who
for a little while have come forth from the world
into these solitudes of God, what hope ye to find ?
Some respite, no doubt, from the anxiety that op-
pressed you in the busy town, in the midst of your
loved ones about the hearth, in the crowded
market place; for you believe that these solitudes
of nature will speak to your hearts and comfort
you, and that in the peace of nature you will find
the true communion of soul that the busy world
26 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
could not give you. Yet are you deceived; for
the sympathy and power of communion between
you and this fair creation have been ruined and
utterly cast away by sin; and this was typified in
the beginning by the banishing of Adam from the
terrestrial paradise. No, the murmur of these
pleasant brooks and the whispering of these happy
leaves shall not speak to the deafened ear of your
soul; nor shall the verdure of these sunny fields
and the glory of these snowy peaks appeal to the
darkened eye of your soul: and this you shall
learn to your utter sorrow. Go back to your
homes, to your toil, to the populous deserts where
your duty lies. Go back and bear bravely the
solitude that God hath given you to bear; for this,
I declare unto you, is the burden and the penalty
laid upon us by the eternal decrees for the sin we
have done, and for the sin of our fathers before
us. Think not, while evil abides in you, ye shall
be aught but alone; for evil is the seeking of self
and the turning away from the commonalty of the
world. Your life shall indeed be solitary until
death, the great solitude, absorbs it at last. Go
back and learn righteousness and meekness; and
it may be, when the end cometh, you shall attain
unto communion with him who alone can speak
to the recluse that dwells within your breast.
And he shall comfort you for the evil of this soli-
tude you bear; for he himself hath borne it, and
His last cry was the cry of desolation, of one for-
saken and made lonely by his God.
HAWTHORNE 2?
I hope I may be pardoned for introducing
memories of so personal a nature into an article
of literary criticism, but there seemed no better
way of indicating the predominant trait of Haw-
thorne's work. Other poets of the past have ex-
celled him in giving expression to certain problems
of our inner life, and in stirring the depths of our
emotional nature; but not in the tragedies of
Greece, or the epics of Italy, or the drama of
Shakespeare will you find any presentation of this
one truth of the^enaltv oi^solitud^laid upon the
human soul so fully and profoundly worked out
as in the romances of Hawthorne. It would be
tedious to take up each of his novels and tales and
show how this theme runs like a sombre thread
through them all, yet it may be worth while to
touch on a few prominent examples.
Shortly after leaving college, Hawthorne pub-
lished a novel which his maturer taste, with pro-
priety, condemned. Despite the felicity of styk|
which seems to have come to Hawthorne by!
natural right, Fanshawe is but a crude and con-j
ventional story. Yet the book is interesting if
only to show how at the very outset the author
struck the keynote of his life's work. The hero
of the tale is the conventional student that figures
in romance, wasted by study, and isolated from
mankind by his intellectual ideals. "He had
seemed, to others and to himself, a solitary being,
upon whom the hopes and fears of ordinary men
were ineffectual." The whole conception of the
28 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
story is a commonplace, yet a commonplace re-
lieved by a peculiar quality in the language which
even in this early attempt predicts the stronger
treatment of his chosen theme when the artist
shall have mastered his craft. There is, too,
something memorable in the parting scene be-
tween the hero and heroine, where Fanshawe,
having earned Ellen's love, deliberately surren-
ders her to one more closely associated with the
world, and himself goes back to his studies and
his death.
From this youthful essay let us turn at once to
his latest work the novel begun when the shadow
of coming dissolution had already fallen upon him,
though still not old in years; to that " tale of the
deathless man" interrupted by the intrusion of
Death, as if in mockery of the artist's theme
Ah, who shall lift that wand of magic power,
And the lost clue regain !
The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower
Unfinished must remain !
In the fragment of The Dolliver Romance we have,
wrought out with all the charm of Hawthorne's
maturest style, a picture of isolation caused, not
by the exclusive ambitions of youth, but by old
age and the frailty of human nature. No extract
or comment can convey the effect of these chapters
of minute analysis, with their portrait of the old
apothecary dwelling in the time-eaten mansion,
whose windows look down on the graves of child-
HAWTHORNE 2$
ren and grandchildren he had outlived and laid
to rest. With his usual sense of artistic contrast,
Hawthorne sets a picture of golden-haired youth
by the side of withered eld :
The Doctor's only child, poor Bessie's offspring, had
died the better part of a hundred years before, and his
grandchildren, a numerous and dimly remembered
brood, had vanished along his weary track in their
youth, maturity, or incipient age, till, hardly knowing
how it had all happened, he found himself tottering on-
ward with an infant's small fingers in his nerveless
grasp.
Again, in describing the loneliness that separates
old age from the busy current of life, Hawthorne
has recourse to a picture which he employed a
number of times, and which seems to have been
drawn from his own experience and to have
haunted his dreams. It is the picture of a be-
wildered man walking the populous streets, and
feeling utterly lost and estranged in the crowd.
So the old doctor ' ' felt a dreary impulse to elude
the people's observation, as if with a sense that he
had gone irrevocably out of fashion; ... or
else it was that nightmare feeling which we some-
times have in dreams, when we seem to find our-
selves wandering through a crowded avenue, with
the noonday sun upon us, in some wild extrava-
gance of dress or nudity." We are reminded by
the words of Hawthorne's own habit, during his
early Salem years, of choosing to walk abroad at
night when no one could observe him, and of his
3O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
trick in later life of hiding in the Concord woods
rather than face a passer-by on the road.
Between Fanshawe, with its story of the seclu-
sion caused by youthful ambition, and The Dolli-
ver Romance, with its picture of isolated old age,
there may be found in the author's successive
works every form of solitude incident to human
existence. I believe no single tale, however short
or insignificant, can be named in which, under
one guise or another, this recurrent idea does not
appear. It is as if the poet's heart were burdened
with an emotion that unconsciously dominated
every faculty of his mind; he walked through life
like a man possessed. Often while reading his
novels I have of a sudden found myself back in
the little chapel at Interlaken, listening to that
strange discourse on the penalty of sin; and the
cry of the text once more goes surging through
my ears, " Why hast thou forsaken me ? " Truly
a curse is upon us; our life is rounded with im-
passable emptiness; the stress of youth, the
feebleness of age, all the passions and desires of
manhood, lead but to this inevitable solitude and
isolation of spirit.
Perhaps the first work to awaken any consider-
able interest in Hawthorne was the story not one
of his best of The Gentle Boy. The pathos of
the poor child severed by religious fanaticism
from the fellowship of the world stirred a sympa-
thetic chord in the New England heart: and it
/nay even be that tears were shed over the home-
HAWTHORNE 31
less lad clinging to his father's grave; for his
' ' father was of the people whom all men hate. ' '
But far more characteristic in its weird intensity
and philosophic symbolism is the story of The
Minister's Black Veil. No one who has read
them has ever forgotten the dying man's fateful
words:
Why do you tremble at me alone? Tremble also at
each other ! Have men avoided me, and women shown
no pity, and children screamed and fled, only for my
black veil? What, but the mystery which it obscurely
typifies, has made this piece of crape so awful ? When
the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend, the lover
to his best beloved ; when man does not vainly shrink
from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up
the secret of his sin ; then deem me a monster, for the
symbol beneath which I have lived, and die ! I look
around me, and, lo ! on every visage a Black Veil !
In another of the Twice-Told Tales the same
thought is presented in a form ghastly aslany-
thing to be found in the pages ofjPo^ or Hoffman.
The Lady Eleanore has come to these shores in
the early colonial days, bringing with her a heart
filled with aristocratic pride. She has, moreover,
all the arrogance of queenly beauty, and her first
entrance into the governor's mansion is over the
prostrate body of a despised lover. Her insolence
is symbolised throughout by a mantle which she
wears, of strange and fascinating splendour, em-
broidered for her by the fingers of a dying woman,
a woman dying, it proves, of the smallpox, so
$2 SttELBURNE ESSAYS
that the infested robe becomes the cause of a
pestilence that sweeps the province. It happens
now and then that Hawthorne falls into a revolt-
ing realism, and the last scene, where Lady Elea-
nore, perishing of the disease that has flowed
from her own arrogance, is confronted by her old
lover, produces a feeling in the reader almost of
loathing. Yet the lady's last words are significant
enough to be quoted: " The curse of Heaven hath
stricken me, because I would not call man my
brother, nor woman sister. I wrapped myself in
PRIDE as in a MANTLE, and scorned the sympa-
thies of nature; and therefore has nature made
this wretched body the medium of a dreadful
sympathy." Alas for the poor, broken creature
of pride! She but suffered for electing freely a
loneliness which, in one form or another, whether
voluntary or involuntary, haunts all the chief
persons of her creator's world. It is, indeed,
nf Hiis ^nlitnHe of spjrit thai- it prp-
. /if^l
' He
1 ' t<;e1f nnw fl * the orip-inal sin awakening
eaven's wrath, and again as itself the penalty
imposed upon the guilty soul : which is but Haw-
thorne'^s way of portraying evil and its retribution
as simultaneous. nay, as one and the same tiling.
But we linger too long on these minor works
of our author. Much has been written about The
Scarlet Letter, and it has been often studied as an
essay in the effects of crime on the human heart.
In truth, one cannot easily find, outside of
^schylus, words of brooding so profound and
HAWTHORNE 33
single-hearted on this solemn subject; their mean-
ing, too, should seem to be written large, yet I am
not aware that the real originality and issue of the
book have hitherto been clearly discussed. Other
poets have laid bare the workings of a diseased
conscience, the perturbations of a soul that has
gone astray; others have shown the confusion
and horror wrought by crime in the family or the
state, and something of these, too, may be found
in the effects of Dimmesdale's sin in the provincial
community; but the true moral of the tale lies in
another direction. It is a story of intertangled
love and hatred working out in four human be-
ings the same primal curse, love and hatred so
woven together that in the end the author asks
whether the two passions be not, after all, the
same, since each renders one individual dependent
upon another for his spiritual food, and each is in
a way an attempt to break through the boundary
that separates soul from soul. From the opening
scene at the prison door, which, " like all that
pertains to crime, seemed never to have known a
youthful era," to the final scene on the scaffold,
where the tragic imagination of the author speaks
with a power barely surpassed in the books of the
world, the whole plot of the romance moves about
this one conception of our human isolation as the
penalty of transgression.
Upon Arthur Dimrnesdale. the punishment falls
most painfully. From the cold and lonely heights
of his spiritual life he has stepped down, in a vain
34 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
endeavour against God's law, to seek the warmth
of companionship in illicit love. He sins, and the
very purity and fineness of his nature make the
act of confession before the world almost an im-
possibility. The result is a strange contradiction
of effects that only Hawthorne could have recon-
ciled. By his sin Dimmesdale is more than ever
cut off from communion with the world, and is '
driven to an asceticism and aloofness so com-
plete that it becomes difficult for him to look any
man in the eye; on the other hand, the brooding
secret of his passion gives him new and powerful
sympathies with life's burden of sorrow, and fills
his sermons with a wonderful eloquence to stir the
hearts of men. This, too, is the paradox running
like a double thread through all the author's
works. Out of our isolation grow the passions
which but illuminate and render more visible the
void from which they sprang ; while, on the other
hand, he is impressed by that truth which led him
to say: " We are but shadows, and all that seems
most real about us is but the thinnest substance
of a dream, till the heart be touched. That
touch creates us, then we begin to be, thereby
we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity."
Opposed to the erring minister stands Roger
Chillingworth, upon whom the curse acts more
hideously, if not more painfully. The incom-
municative student, misshapen from his birth
hour, who has buried his life in books and starved
his emotions to feed his brain, would draw the fair
HAWTHORNE 35
maiden Hester into his heart, to warm that inner-
most chamber left lonely and chill and without a
household fire. Out of this false and illicit desire
springs all the tragedy of the tale. Dimmesdale
suffers for his love; but the desire of Chilling-
worth, because it is base, and because his charac-
ter is essentially selfish, is changed into rancorous
hatred. And here again the effect of the man's
passion is twofold: it endows him with a malig-
nant sympathy toward the object of his hate,
enabling him to play on the victim's heart as a
musician gropes among the strings of an instru-
ment, and at the same time it severs him more
absolutely from the common weal, blotting out his
life, " as completely as if he indeed lay at the
bottom of the ocean. ' '
And what shall we say of the fair and piteous
Hester Prynne ? Upon her the author has lavished
all his art : he has evoked a figure of womanhood
whose memory haunts the mind like that of an-
other Helen. L,ike Helen's, her passive beauty
has been the cause of strange trials and pertur-
bations of which she must herself partake; she is
more human than Beatrice, nobler and larger
than Marguerite, a creation altogether fair and
wonderful. Yet she too must be caught in this
embroilment of evil and retribution. The Scarlet
Letter upon her breast is compared by the author
to the brand on the brow of Cain, a mark that
symbolises her utter separation from the mutual
joys and sorrows of the world. She walks about
36 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
the provincial streets like some lonely bearer of a
monstrous fate. Yet because her guilt lies open
to the eyes of mankind, and because she accepts
the law of our nature, striving to aid and uplift
the faltering hearts about her without seeking re-
lease from the curse in closer human attachments,
following unconsciously the doctrine of the ancient
Hindu book,
Therefore apply thyself unto work as thy duty bids, yet
without attachment ;
Even for the profiting of the people apply thyself unto
work,
because she renounces herself and the cravings of
self, we see her gradually glorified in our presence,
until the blessings of all the poor and afflicted fol-
low her goings about, and the Scarlet Letter, ceas-
ing to be a stigma of scorn, becomes ' ' a type of
something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon
with awe, yet with reverence too."
As a visible outcome of the guilty passion little
Seail stands before us, an elfin child that " lacked
reference and adaptation to the world into which
she was born," and that lived with her mother in
/a " circle of seclusion from human society." But
the suffering of the parents is efficient finally to
set their child free from the curse; and at the last,
when the stricken father proclaims his guilt in
public and acknowledges his violation of the law,
we see Pearl kissing him and weeping, and her
tears are a pledge that she is to grow up amid
HAWTHORNE 37
common joys and griefs, nor forever do battle with
the world.
And in the end what of the love between Arthur
and Hester? Was it redeemed of shame, and
made prophetic of a perfect union beyond the
grave ? Alas, there is something pitiless and aw-
ful in the last words of the two, as the man lies
on the scaffold, dying in her arms:
"Shall we not meet again? " whispered she, bending
her face down close to his. " Shall we not spend our
immortal life together? Surely, surely, we have ran-
somed one another, with all this woe ! Thou lookest far
into eternity, with those bright dying eyes ! Then tell
me what thou seest? "
"Hush, Hester, hush!" said he, with tremulous
solemnity. "The law we broke! the sin here so
awfully revealed ! let these alone be in thy thoughts !
I fear! I fear! It may be that, when we forgot our
God, when we violated our reverence each for the
other's soul, it was thenceforth vain to hope that we
could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure
reunion."
With his next novel Hawthorne enters upon a
new phase of his art. Henceforth he seems to
have brooded not so much on the immediate effect
of evil as on its influence when handed down in a
family from generation to generation, and symbo-
lised (for his mind must inevitably speak through
symbols) by the ancestral fatality of gurgling
blood in the throat or by the print of a bloody
footstep. But whatever the symbol employed, the
38 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
moral outcome of the ancient wrong is always the
same: in Septimius Felton, in The Dolliver Ro-
mance, and most of all in The House of the Seven
Gables, the infection of evil works itself out in the
loneliness of the last sufferers, and their isolation
from the world.
It is not my intention to analyse in detail Haw-
thorne's remaining novels. As for The House of
the Seven Gables, we know what unwearied care
the author bestowed on the description of Miss
Hepzibah Pyncheon, alone in the desolate family
mansion, and on her grotesque terrors when forced
to creep from her seclusion; and how finely he has
painted the dim twilight of alienation from him-
self and from the world into which the wretched
Clifford was thrust! And Judge Pyncheon, the
portly, thick-necked, scheming man of action,
who, in imagination, does not perceive him, at
last, sitting in the great oaken chair, fallen asleep
with wide-staring eyes while the watch ticks
noisily in his hand? Asleep, but none shall
arouse him from that slumber, and warn him that
the hour of his many appointments is slipping by.
What immutable mask of indifference has fallen
upon his face ? " The features are all gone: there
is only the paleness of them left. And how looks
it now? There is no window! There is no face!
An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated
sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled
away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may
hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go
HAWTHORNE 39
sighing and murmuring about, in quest of what
was once a world ! Is there no other sound ? One
other, and a fearful one. It is the ticking of the
Judge's watch, which, ever since Hepzibah left
the room in search of Clifford, he has been hold-
ing in his hand. Be the cause what it may, this
little, quiet, never ceasing throb of Time's pulse,
repeating its small strokes with such busy regu-
larity, in Judge Pyncheon's motionless hand, has
an effect of terror, which we do not find in any
other accompaniment of the scene."
Many times, while reading this story and the
others that involve an ancestral curse, I have been
struck by something of similarity and contrast at
once between our New England novelist and
JEschylus, the tragic poet of Athens. It should
seem at first as if the vast gap between the civilisa-
tions that surrounded the two writers and the
utterly different forms of their art would preclude
any real kinship; and yet I know not where, un-
less in these late romances, any companion can be
found in modern literature to the Orestean con-
ception of satiety begetting insolence, and inso-
lence calling down upon a family the inherited
curse of At. It may be reckoned the highest
praise of Hawthorne that his work can suggest
any such comparison with the masterpiece of
^schylus, and not be entirely emptied of value
by the juxtaposition. But if ^schylus and Haw-
thorne are alike poets of Destiny and of the fate-
ful inheritance of woe, their methods of portraying
4O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
the power and handiwork of Ate are perfectly dis-
tinct. The Athenian too represents Orestes, the
last inheritor of the curse, as cut off from the fel-
lowship of mankind; but to recall the Orestean
tale, with all its tragic action of murder and ma-
tricide and frenzy, is to see in a clearer light the
originality of Hawthorne's conception of moral
retribution in the disease of inner solitude. There
is in the difference something, of course, of the
constant distinction between classic and modern
art; but added to this is the creative idealism of
Hawthorne's rare and elusive genius.
I have dwelt at some length on The Scarlet
Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, because
they are undoubtedly the greatest of Hawthorne's
romances and the most thoroughly permeated
with his peculiar ideas, works so nearly perfect,
withal, in artistic execution that the mind of the
reader is overwhelmed by a sense of the power
and self-restraint possible to human genius.
Over the other two long novels we must pass
lightly, although they are not without bearing on
the subject in hand. The Blithedale Romance,
being in every way the slightest and most colour-
less of the novels, would perhaps add little to the
discussion. But in The Marble Faun it would be
interesting to study the awakening of Donatello's
half- animal nature to the fullness of human sym-
pathies by his love for Miriam; and to follow
Miriam herself, moving, with the dusky veil of
secrecy about her, amidst the crumbling ruins and
HAWTHORNE 41
living realities of Rome like some phantom of the
city's long-buried tragedies. Hawthorne never
made known the nature of the shadow that hov-
ered over this exotic creature, and it may be that
he has here indulged in a piece of pure mystifi-
cation; but for my own part I could never resist
the conviction that she suffers for the same cause
as Shelley's Beatrice Cenci. Granting such a con-
jecture to be well founded, it would throw light
on our thesis to compare the two innocent victims
of the same hideous crime : to observe the frenzy
aroused in Beatrice by her wrong, and the passion
of her acts, and then to look upon the silent, un-
earthly Miriam, snatched from the hopes of
humanity, and wrapped in the shadows of im-
penetrable isolation. Powerful as is the story of
the Cenci, to me, at least, the fate of Miriam is
replete with deeper woe and more transcendent
meaning.
It is natural that the reader of these strange
stories and stranger confessions should ask, al-
most with a shudder, what manner of man was
the author. We do not wonder that his family,
in their printed memoirs, should have endeavoured
in every way to set forth the social and sunny side
of his character, and should have published the
Note-Books with the avowed purpose of dispelling
the "often-expressed opinion that Mr. Hawthorne
was gloomy and morbid." Let us admit with
them that he had but the " inevitable pensiveness
and gravity " of one to whom has been given "the
42 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
awful power of insight. ' ' No one supposes for a
moment that Hawthorne's own mind was clouded
with the remorseful consciousness of secret guilt;
and we are ready to accept his statement that he
had ' ' no love of secrecy and darkness, ' ' and that
his extreme reserve had only made his writmgis
more objective.
Morbid in any proper sense of the word Haw-
thorne cannot be called, except in so far as
throughout his life he cherished one dominant
idea, and that a^ peculiar state of mental isolation
whjch_destroy.q the illusions leading to action, and
JJIQ tqnds at last fo wpaTr^n the will; and there are,
it must be confessed, signs in the maturer age of
Hawthorne that his will actually succumbed to
the attacks of this subtle disillusionment. But
beyond this there is in his work no taint of un-
wholesomeness, unless it be in itself unwholesome
to be possessed by one absorbing thought. We
have no reason to discredit his own statement:
' ' When I write anything that I know or suspect
is morbid, I feel as though I had told a lie." Nor
was he even a mystery-monger: the mysjerloiis
elementjnjiis stories, which affeots some prnsaio
minds asja_taint of morbidness, is due to the m-
tensejsvmbolism of his thong-lit, to the intrinsic
mingling n f t>)f
ideal. I^ike one of his own characters, he could
"qgver separate the idea frpfn ttip symbol in
which it man.ifrtsJtself^ Yet the idea is always
there. He is strong both in analysis and general-
HAWTHORNE 43
isation ; there is no weakening of the intellectual
faculties. Furthermore, his pages are pervaded
with .a^subtle ironical humour hardly compatible
with morbidness^ not a boisterous humour that
awakens laughter, but the mood, half quizzical
and half pensive, of a man who stands apart and
smiles at the foibles and pretensions of the world.
Now and then there is something rare and unex-
pected in his wit, as, for example, in his comment
on the Italian mosquitoes : * ' They are bigger than
American mosquitoes ; and if you crush them,
after one of their feasts, it makes a terrific blood
spot. It is a sort of suicide to kill them." And
if there is to be found in his tales a fair share
of disagreeable themes, yet he never confounds
things of good and evil report, nor things fair and
foul; the moral sense is intact. Above all, there
is no undue appeal to the sensations or emotions.
Rather it is true, as we remarked in the begin-
ning, that the lack of outward emotion, together
with their poignancy of silent appeal, is a dis-
tinguishing mark of Hawthorne's writings. The
thought underlying all his work is one to trouble
the depths of our nature, and to stir in us the
sombrest chords of brooding, but it does not move
us to tears or passionate emotion: those affections
are dependent on our social faculties, and are
starved in the rarefied air of his genius. Haw-
thorne indeed relates that the closing chapters of
The Scarlet Letter, when read aloud to his wife,
sent her to bed with a sick headache. And yet,
44 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
as a judicious critic has observed, this may have
been in part just because the book seals up the
fountain of tears.
It needs but a slight acquaintance with his own
letters and Note-Books, and with the anecdotes
current about him, to be assured that never lived
a man to whom ordinary contact with his fellows
was more impossible, and that the mysterious
solitude in which his fictitious characters move is
a mere shadow of his own imperial loneliness of
soul. ' * I have made a captive of myself, ' ' he
writes in a letter of condolence to L,ongfellow,
" and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot
find the key to let myself out; and if the door
were open, I should be almost afraid to come out.
You tell me that you have met with troubles and
changes. I know not what these may have been,
but I can assure you that trouble is the next best
thing to enjoyment, and that there is no fate in
this world so horrible as to have no share in its
joys or sorrows." Was ever a stranger letter of
condolence penned ?
Hven the wider sympathies of the race seem to
have been wanting in the man as they are want-
ing in his books. It is he who said of himself,
* ' Destiny itself has often been worsted in the at-
tempt to get me out to dinner." Though he lived
in the feverish ante-bellum days, he was singu-
larly lacking in the political sense, and could look
with indifference on the slave question. When at
last the war broke out, and he was forced into
HAWTHORNE 45
sympathies foreign to his nature, it seemed as if
something gave way within him beneath the un-
accustomed stress. It is said, and with probable
truth, that the trouble of his heart actually caused
his death. His novels are full of brooding over
the past, but of real historic sympathy he had
none. He has mentioned the old Concord fight
almost with contempt, and in his travels the
homes of great men and the scenes of famous
deeds rarely touched him with enthusiasm.
Strangest of all, in a writer of such moral depth,
is his coldness toward questions of religion. So
marked was this apathy that George Ripley is re-
ported to have said on the subject of Hawthorne's
religious tendencies, ' ' There were none, no rev-
erence in his nature." He was not sceptical, to
judge from his occasional utterances, but simply
indifferent; the matter did not interest him. He
was by right of inheritance a Puritan; all the in-
tensity of the Puritan nature remained in him,
and all the overwhelming sense of the heinousness
of human depravity, but these, cut off from the old
faith, took on a new form of their own. Where
the Puritan teachers had fulminated the ven-
geance of an outraged God, Hawthorne saw only
the infinite isolation of the errant soul. In one of
his stories, in many ways the most important of
his shorter works, he has chosen for his theme the
Unpardonable Sin, and it is interesting to read the
tale side by side with some of the denunciatory
sermons of the older divines.
46 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
It is not necessary to repeat the story of Ethan
I/Brand, the lime burner, who, in the wilderness of
the mountains, in the silences of the night while
he fed the glowing furnace, conceived the idea
of producing in himself the Unpardonable Sin.
Every one must remember how at last he found
his quest in his own wretched heart that had re-
fused to beat in human sympathy, and had re-
garded the men about him as so many problems
to be studied. In the end, he who had denied
the brotherhood of man, and spurned the guid-
ance of the stars, and who now refuses to sur-
render his body back to the bosom of Mother
Earth, in the end he must call on the deadly
element of fire as his only friend, and so, with
blasphemy on his lips, flings himself into the
flaming oven. It is a sombre and weird catas-
trophe, but the tragic power of the scene lies in the
picture of utter loneliness in the guilty breast.
And would you hear by its side the denunciations
of our greatest theologian against sin? Read
but a paragraph from the sermons of Jonathan
Edwards:
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as
one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the
fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. . . .
If you cry to God to pity you, he will be so far from
pitying you in your doleful case, or showing you the
least regard or favour, that, instead of that, he will only
tread you underfoot. . . . And though he will know
that you cannot bear the weight of omnipotence treading
upon you, yet he will not regard that ; but he will crush
HAWTHORNE 47
you under his feet without mercy ; he will crush out
your blood and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled on
his garments, so as to stain all his raiment.
Is it a wonder that strong men were moved to
tears and women fainted beneath such words?
Yet in the still hours of meditation there is to us,
at least, something more appalling in the gloomy
imaginations of Hawthorne, because they are
founded more certainly on everlasting truth.
I have spoken as if the mental attitude of Haw-
thorne was one common to the race, however it
may be exaggerated in form by his own inner
vision; and to us of the western world, over whom
have passed centuries of Christian brooding, and
who find ourselves suddenly cut loose from the
consolation of Christian faith, his voice may well
seem the utterance of universal experience, and
we may be even justified in assuming that his
words have at last expressed what has long slum-
bered in human consciousness. His was not the"
bitterness, the fierce indignation of loneliness, that
devoured the heart of Swift; nor yet the terror of
a soul like Cowper's, that believed itself guilty of
the unpardonable sin, and therefore condemned to
everlasting exile and torment; nor Byron's per-
sonal rancour and hatred of society; nor the
ecstasy of Thomas a Kempis, whose spirit was
rapt away out of the turmoil of existence; but
rather an intensification of the solitude that in-
vests the modern world, and by right found its
deepest expression in the New England heart.
48 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Not with impunity had the human race for ages
dwelt on the eternal welfare of the soul; for from
such meditation the sense of personal importance
had become exacerbated to an extraordinary de-
gree. What could result from such teaching as
that of Jonathan Edwards but an extravagant
sense of individual existence, as if the moral gov-
ernance of the world revolved about the action of
each mortal soul ? And when the alluring faith
attendant on this form of introspection paled, as it
did during the so-called transcendental movement
into which Hawthorne was born, there resulted
necessarily a feeling of anguish and bereavement
more tragic than any previous moral stage through
which the world had passed. The loneliness of
the individual, which had been vaguely felt and
lamented by poets and philosophers of the past,
took on a poignancy altogether unexampled. It
needed but an artist with the vision of Hawthorne
y to represent this feeling as the one tragic calamity
of mortal life, as the great primeval curse of sin.
What lay dormant in the teaching of Christianity
became the universal protest of the human heart.
In no way can we better estimate the univers-
ality, and at the same time the modern note,
of Hawthorne's solitude than by turning for a
moment to the literature of the far-off Ganges.
There, too, on the banks of the holy river, men
used much to ponder on the life of the human
soul in its restless wandering from birth to birth;
and in their books we may read of a loneliness as
HAWTHORNE 49
profound as Hawthorne's, though quite distinct
in character. To them, also, we are born alone,
we die alone, and alone we reap the fruits of our
good and evil deeds. The dearest ties of our
earthly existence are as meaningless and transient
as the meeting of spar with drifting spar on the
ocean waves. Yet in all this it is the isolation of the
soul from the source of universal life that troubles
human thought; there is no cry of personal an-
guish here, such as arises from Christianity, for
the loss of individuality is ever craved by the
Hindu as the highest good. And besides this
distinction between the Western and Eastern
forms of what may be called secular solitude, the
Hindu carried the idea into abstract realms
whither no Occidental can penetrate. .
HE, in that solitude before
The world was, looked the wide void o'er
And nothing saw, and said, Lo, I
Alone ! and still we echo the lone cry.
Thereat He feared, and still we fear
In solitude when naught is near :
And, L,o, He said, myself alone !
What cause of dread when second is not known !
But into this dim region of Oriental mysticism
we have no reason to intrude. We may at least
count it among the honours of our literature that
it was left for a denizen of this far Western land,
living in the midst of a late-born and confused
civilisation, to give artistic form to a thought that,
50 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
in fluctuating form, has troubled the minds of
philosophers from the beginning. Other authors
may be greater in so far as they touch our passions
more profoundly, but to the solitude of Nathaniel
Hawthorne we owe the most perfect utterance of
a feeling that must seem to us now as old and as
deep as life itself.
It would be easy to explain Hawthorne's pe-
culiar temperament, after the modern fashion, by
reference to heredity and environment. No doubt
there was a strain of eccentricity in the family.
He himself tells of a cousin who made a spittoon
out of the skull of his enemy; and it is natural
that a descendant of the old Puritan witch judge
should portray the weird and grotesque aspects of
life. Probably this native tendency was increased
by the circumstances that surrounded his youth:
the seclusion of his mother's life ; his boyhood on
L,ake Sebago, where, as he says, he first got his
"cursed habit of solitude;" and the long years
during which he lived as a hermit in Salem.
But, after all, these external matters, and even
the effect of heredity so far as we can fathom it,
explain little or nothing. A thousand other men
might have written his books if their source lay
in such antecedents. Behind it all was the dae-
monic force of the man himself, the everlasting
mystery of genius habiting in his brain, and
choosing him to be an exemplar and interpreter
of the inviolable individuality in which lie the
pain and glory of our human estate.
THE ORIGINS OF HAWTHORNE AND
POE
WE are credibly told that in years not so very
long past young women and even grave men used
to read the Gothic tales of Ann Radcliffe with
tense brows and trembling lips; and the essays of
Carlyle still stand a voluble witness to prove how
seriously the grotesque marvels of German ro-
mance were once accepted in England. Mrs.
Radcliffe is no doubt read occasionally to-day,
and the indefatigable Mr. L,ang has even at-
tempted to reinstate her in popular favour. But
her most generous admirer could hardly aver that
she was anything more to him than a curious
amusement; the horror of her tales has vanished
away like the moonlight she was so fond of de-
scribing. And as for Tieck and Wackenroder
and all that dim romantic crew of Teuton Sturm
and Drang not even an Andrew L,ang has arisen
for them.
It is a matter for reflection, therefore, that in
this country a new life of Hawthorne l should be
1 Nathaniel Hawthorne. By George B. Woodberry.
[American Men of Letters.] Boston : Houghton, Mif-
flin & Co.
51
52 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
something of a literary event and that there should
be a sufficient public to warrant the issue of two
new and elaborate editions of Poe ; * for at first
thought it might seem that both Hawthorne and
Poe fall in the same class with those forgotten
weavers of moonlight and mysticism. What is it,
indeed, that gives vitality to their work and sepa-
rates it from the ephemeral product of English
and German Gothicism? More than that: Why
is it that the only two writers of America^who
have won_almost universal renown as artists are
these romancers, eaoVi of whom is. after his own
rrmnn^r, a sovereign in that strange region of
emotion which we name the weird ? Other work
they have done, and done well, but when we call
to mind their distinguishing productions we think
first of such scenes as The Fall of the House of
Usher, The Raven, and The Sleeper, or of such
characters as Arthur Dimmesdale with his morbid
remorse and unearthly sufferings, the dreamlike
existence of Clifford, the hideous unexplained
mystery of Miriam's wrong, and the awful search
of Kthan Brand scenes and characters which
belong to the real world, for they appeal to a
sympathetic chord in our own breasts, but which
are yet quite overlaid with some insistent shadow
of the fantastic realm of symbolism.
Hawthorne scribes the superiority of Nature's
work over man's to the fact " that the former
1 Published respectively by Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.
and by G. P. Putnam's Sous,
HAWTHORNE AND POE 53
works from the innermost germ, while the latter
works merely superficially," and the same ex-
planation may be given of the genuineness of his
own work and Poe's in comparison with the un-
reality of Mrs. Radcliffe or Tieck; the weird, un-
earthly substance moulded by their genius is from
the innermost core of the national consciousness. *
Their achievement is not like the Gothic novel
introduced into Kngland by Horace Walpole, a
mere dilettante; there is in them very little of that
recrudescence of mediaeval superstition and gloom
which marked the rise of romanticism in Europe,
little or nothing of the knights and ladies, turrets
and dungeons and all that tawdry paraphernalia,
and, fortunately for their reputation, no taint of
that peculiar form of sentimentalism which per-
vades the German Herzensergiessungen like the
odour of Schiller's decaying apples. Their work
is the last efflorescence of a tradition handed down
to them unbroken from the earliest Colonial days,
and that tradition was the voice of a stern and in-
domitable moral character. The unearthly visions
of Poe and Hawthorne are in no wise the result
of literary whim or of unbridled individualism,
but are deep-rooted in American history. Neither
Professor Woodberry in his Life of Hawthorne
nor Professor Harrison in his Life of Poe has, it
seems to me, brought out with due emphasis these
sgiritjUjdjDrjgh^ which is
so unique in its way as to have made for itself a
sure place in the literature of the worldo
54 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
The name of Hawthorne carries us back at once
to those grim days of his ancestor in Salem Village
when for a season almost the whole community
gave itself up to the frenzy of witch hunting. In
the earlier days the superstitions of England were
concerned chiefly with the fairy folk of hearth and
field, a quaint people commonly, and kindly dis-
posed, if mischievous. But with the advent of
Puritanism came a change; the fair and frolicsome
play of the fancy was discredited and the starved
imagination had its revenge. In place of the
elves and goblins of a freer age, instead of "Robin
Goodfellow, the spoorn, the man-in-the-oak, the
hell wain, the firedrake, the puckle ' ' and all that
antic crew, the imagination now evoked the ter-
rific spectre of the Devil and attributed to his per-
jonal agency all the misnaps oi hie. Hence it is
Ithat witchcraft became so much more prominent
with the Reformation and reached its height
where Puritan feelings prevailed. On the one
hand it was employed by the Roman Church as
an aid in its exterminating fight with the Wal-
denses and other heretics the good monks no
doubt being easily persuaded, where persuasion
was necessary, that the ascetic revolt against the
office of the imagination in worship was of dia-
bolic origin and, on the other hand, the Protest-
ants, and particularly the Puritans with their
morbid horror of sin, were quick to accredit to the
author of sin every phenomenon they could not
understand. Witchcraft, to be sure, is as old as
HAWTHORNE AND POE 55
history, and we need go no further abroad than
the classic poets for tales of the most abominable
night hags. But there is this difference between
such monsters as Lucan's Krichtho and the abor-
tions of Christian demonology: Erichtho may
haunt the sepulchres and breathe into the cold
mouths of the dead the dark secret she would
transmit to the Shades, but in the end she is only
a product of the imagination brooding on things
unclean and hideous; there is in the dread and re-
pugnance she inspires no such added horror as
that which the Christian felt at the thought of a
soul leagued for infamous ends with the Prince of
Hell and doomed as a rebel against God to ever-
lasting tortures.
Considering the history of the Puritan emi-
grants we shall not be surprised to find these su-
perstitions breaking out with peculiar virulence
in the New World. Persecution and insult at
home had not tended to soften their temper, nor
did flight across a waste of perilous waters to a
wilderness where everything was strange and un-
explored bring light and cheerfulness to their
imagination. In Kn gland at least their morbid
intensity was to some extent modified by contact !
with the worldly life about them; in their new
home they were completely given up to the work-
ing out of their stern purposes. Terrors and diffi-
culties only added fuel to their zeal. ' ' Our faithers
were Englishmen which came over this great
ocean and were ready to perish in this wilder-
56 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
ness," says old Governor Bradford; and "with
what difficulties [they] wrastled in going throug
these things," we may read in all our school-
books. It is easy to see how these hardships and
these bitterly -won victories increased the sternness
and unyieldingness of the New England Puritans,
but perhaps we do not often consider the influence
exerted on their imaginations by the wild country
and wilder "salvages," as they called the red men,
that now engaged their attention. They no longer
beheld about them the pleasant vales and green
hills of Old England, which the long habitation of
man had rendered almost human, but the vast and
pathless forests of the wilderness, where nature ap-
peared under a new and forbidding aspect. There
is at the best something weird and uncannny
about the great woods into whose depths the eye
cannot penetrate and from whose interwoven
shadows, especially when night has fallen and the
ear has grown painfully alert, come forth at inter-
vals sounds that seem to indicate the activity of
some nameless secret life within the darkness.
What then must have been the feelings of the
New England farmer as perchance he made his
way homeward at sundown along the border of
the gloomy forest. The kindly fancy of his an-
cestors who peopled the woods with mischievous
goblins had yielded to his belief in the extended
powers of evil. In these deep shadows he knew
not but the very enemy of God might be lurking
to lure him to destruction. It was no pleasant
HAWTHORNE AND POE 57
waldeinsamkeit he felt, such as romantic poets
love to indulge, but awe and ghostly terror.
And this feeling was exaggerated by the actual
savages who inhabited the woods. The settlers
were for the most part thoroughly convinced that
these poor, brutal denizens of the wilderness were
under the special tutelage of Satan. In times
of distress the colonists were ready to charge all
their calamities to the machinations of an infernal
conspiracy.
It was afterward by them [the Indians] confessed, [says
Cotton Mather in his Magnalid], that upon the arrival
of the English in these parts, the Indians employed
their sorcerers, whom they call powaws, like Balaam, to
curse them, and let loose their demons upon them, to
shipwreck them, to distract them, to poison them, or
any way to ruin them. All the noted powaws in the
country spent three days together in diabolical conjura-
tions, to obtain the assistance of the devils against the
settlement of these our English.
It is not strange, therefore, that when the de-
lusion of witchcraft fell upon these people it should
have assumed a peculiarly tragic aspect. They
were dwelling in the midst of hostile demonic
powers, and, feeling themselves attacked, they
turned upon the enemy with all the strength and
intensity of their souls. And how real and ma-
terial the phenomena appeared to the bewildered
onlookers may be gathered from this sulfurous
account written by an eyewitness of the sufferings
of one of the victims:
$8 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Margaret Rule would sometimes have her jaws forcibly
pulled open, whereupon something invisible would be
poured down her throat: we all saw her swallow, and
yet we saw her try all she could, by spitting, coughing,
and shrieking, that she might not swallow; but one time
the standers-by plainly saw something of that odd liquor
itself on the outside of her neck; she cried out of it, as
if scalding brimstone were poured into her, and the
whole house would immediately scent so hot of brim-
stone that we were scarce able to endure it.
Under the stress of this morbid excitement the
good people of Salem and the neighbourhood
were thrown into a frenzy of fear; crops were
abandoned, business stood still, and % the only
j-natters considered were the horrible parser nH on g
_nfJfotfl.Ti in. tVteir rnidst. The general feeling of
alarm was aggravated to something like des-
peration when the Rev. Deodat L,awson in the
meeting-house of Salem village preached an in-
flammatory sermon in which he charged the
outburst of the infernal powers directly to the sins
of the people.
You are therefore to be deeply humbled, [he said,]
and sit in the dust, considering the signal hand of God
in singling out this place, this poor village, for the first
seat of Satan's tyranny, and to make it (as 'twere) the
rendezvous of devils, where they muster their infernal
forces; appearing to the afflicted as coming armed to
carry on their malicious designs against the bodies, and,
if God in mercy prevent not, against the souls of many
in this place.
No wonder that the people did actually believe
" that the devils were walking about our streets
HAWTHORNE AND POE $9
with lengthened chains, making a dreadful noise
in our ears; and brimstone (even without a meta-
phor) was making a horrid and a hellish stench
in our nostrils."
To stop these terrible inroads of Satan a special
court was created, before which those previously
examined were tried. Those found guilty were
hanged on a conspicuous eminence which thus
acquired the ominous title of witch-hill; and how
awful was the spectacle there presented to the
panic-stricken people may be gathered from the
pious ejaculation of the Reverend Mr. Noyes,
" What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of
hell hanging there ! " The cruelty engendered by
this feeling of insecurity is well indicated by the
treatment of Giles Corey, who, refusing to plead
either guilty or not guilty, was subjected to the
peine dure et forte, as the tale is related in Long-
fellow's New England Tragedy; but Longfellow
does not relate what we are told in a ballad of the
period, that when from the oppression of the stone
on his chest Corey's tongue protruded it was
rudely thrust back by the staff of a bystander.
In due time this " hellish molestation," as one
of the persecuted called it, came to a sudden end;
but not before twenty victims had suffered death,
many had died in jail, hundreds had endured im-
prisonment in its worst forms, whole families had
been impoverished, and a moral impression had
been made upon the community which nothing
could efface. The modern historian of the delu-
60 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
sion tells us that a sort of curse still rests on the
immediate scene of these tragic events and that
neglect and desertion still brood on the accursed
spot.
Were we to go no further than this episode of
Salem history we should find it easy to explain
by inheritance that mystic brooding over the dark
and intricate effects of sin which the descendant
of old John Hathorne has made the substance of
his romance, or to account for the realism that
underlies the wild fantasies of Poe. And we need
only to dip into Cotton Mather's voluminous rec-
ord of the dealings of Providence in America to
see how intensely the mind of the Puritans was
occupied with unearthly matters and what a leg-
acy of emotions approaching the weird was left by
them to posterity. When the faith of these mili-
tant saints was untroubled it often assumed a
sweetness and fullness of spiritual content that
might even pass into rapturous delight. But al-
ways this intoxicating joy bordered on the region
of awe the awe of a soul in the presence of the
great and ineffable mysteries of holiness; and the
life of Thomas Shepard, which Mather calls " a
trembling walk with God" may not unfitly be
taken to illustrate the peculiar temper of their re-
ligion. And if in the wisest and sanest of the
Puritan Fathers this trembling solicitude was
never far away, there were others in whom the
fear of the Lord became a mania of terror. Con-
sider what the impression on the minds of child-
HAWTHORNE AND POE 61
ren must have been when in the midst of their
innocent sport the awful apparition of the Rev.
James Noyes stood before them and rebuked them
into silence with these solemn words: " Cousins,
I wonder you can be so merry, unless you are
sure of your salvation! " Consider the spiritual
state of a young man, celebrated for his godliness,
who could note down in his diary with curious
precision: "I was almost in the suburbs of hell all
day."
literature, in the true sense of the word, could
not well flourish among a people who saw in the
plastic imagination a mere seduction of the senses,
and whose intellectual life was thus absorbed in
theological speculation. To be sure, a good deal
of verse was written and even printed in early
Colonial days; but of all the poets of that age only
one attained any real celebrity and has in a way
lived on into the present. Michael Wigglesworth,
the faithful pastor of Maiden, where in the odour
of sanctity he died in 1705, is described as " a
little feeble shadow of a man ; ' ' but his diminutive
frame harboured a mighty spirit. His poems
breathed the very quintessence of Puritan faith,
and as such obtained immediate and extraordi-
nary popularity. Professor Tyler calculates that
in the first year of publication his Day of Doom
was purchased by at least one in every thirty-five
persons of New England; printed as a common
ballad it was hawked everywhere about the coun-
try, and its lugubrious stanzas were even taught
62 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
to children along with the catechism. As late as
the year 1828 an essayist declared that many an
aged person of his acquaintance could still repeat
the poem, though they might not have seen a copy
of it since they were in leading strings; and
in his own time Cotton Mather had thought it
might " perhaps find our children till the day it-
self arrives " which God forbid.
The strength of Master Wigglesworth's genius,
in this picture of the Day of Doom, is, as we
should expect, devoted to those who
void of tears, but fill'd with fears,
and dreadful expectation
Of endless pains and scalding flames,
stand waiting for Damnation.
One after another the various kinds of sinners are
arraigned at the bar and receive their due reward.
Most hideous and most famous of all are the
stanzas that describe the pleading and condemna-
tion of unbaptised infants. As an expression of
the grotesque in literature they are not without a
kind of crude power; as the voice of a real and
tremendously earnest faith they elude the grasp
of a modern mind, one can only shudder and avert
his eyes. We contrast with some curiosity and
no little bewilderment the unflinching frankness
of this earlier Calvinist with the shifting creed
of a recent Calvinistic convention which has at-
tempted to explain away the catechism's abandon-
ment of non-elect infants. Yet Wigglesworth,
HAWTHORNE AND POE 63
like the Presbyterians of to-day, had his moment
of compunction for the poor souls who
from the womb unto the tomb
Were straightway carried;
he at least allowed to them ' ' the easiest room in
hell! " Those simple words have of recent years
acquired a\certain notoriety through literary hand
books; indeed, for naked and appalling realism of
horror, when all is considered, it would not be
easy to find a verse to surpass them.
Wigglesworth's rhymes were, as I said, the
intellectual food of the young, and some such
strong meat would seem necessary to prepare
them for the sermons that nourished their man-
hood. And at least one of these sermons, Jona-
than Edwards' s famous Enfield discourse of
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, has
gained the unenviable reputation of being perhaps
the most tremendous and uncompromising enun-
ciation ever made of the gloomier side of Calvin-
ism. His picture of worldly men hanging over
the pit of hell "by a slender thread, with the
flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and
ready every moment to singe it and burn it asun-
der," has become classical in its own way.
After the death of Edwards, in 1758, the heart
of the country became more and more absorbed in
the impending conflict of the Revolution. For
a while, at least, religion and the terrors of dam-
nation must give place to the more imminent peril
64 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
of political subjugation. In New England that
other phase of Puritanism, the spirit that had led
Cromwell and his Ironsides to victory, and had
established the liberties of the English constitu-
tion, came to the foreground, and for a time the
political pamphlet usurped the place of the ser-
mon. But even then literature did not entirely
vanish; and at intervals through the rasping
cries of revolution one may catch a note of that
pensiveness or gloom, that habitual dwelling on
the supernatural significance of life, which had
come to be the dominant intellectual tone of the
country. Indeed, it was this violent wrenching
of the national consciousness into new fields which
brought about the change from the old supernat-
uralism of religion to the shadowy symbolism of
literature as exemplified in Hawthorne and Poe.
We seem to see the beginning of this new spirit
in the haunting pathos that throbs through the
anonymous ballad of Nathan Hale :
The breezes went steadily through the tall pines,
A saying, " Oh! hu-ush! " a saying, "Oh! hu-ush! "
As stilly stole by a bold legion of horse,
For Hale in the bush, for Hale in the bush.
" Keep still," said the thrush as she nestled her young,
In a nest by the road; in a nest by the road;
!< For the tyrants are near and with them appear
What bodes us no good; what bodes us no good."
Of all the gentlemen and women, too who
wrote verse in those stirring times only one can
HAWTHORNE AND POE 65
lay claim to any genuine poetic inspiration.
Philip Freneau, of New Jersey, has even yet a
slight hold on the memory of the reading public,
and would be more read and better known were
his works subjected to proper selection and edit-
ing. Like all the other versifiers of the period
Freneau was caught in the wild vortex of politi-
cal affairs, and, against the protests of his truer
nature as he himself avows, gave up the gentler
muses for the raucous voice of satire. But here
and there through his works we find a suggestion
of what he might have accomplished had he fallen
on better times. In him we catch perhaps the
first note of the weird as it appears in our later
literature, of that transition of overwhelming
superstition into shadowy haunting symbolism.
Not unseldom a stanza, or a single line it may
be, wakes an echo in the mind curiously like Poe.
Such, for instance, is the spectral beauty of that
stanza of The Indian Burying Ground, whose last
line, as Poe once pointed out, was borrowed intact,
and never acknowledged, by Campbell:
By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews,
In vestments for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer a shade.
A glance at the titles of Freneau' s poems would
show how persistently, when relieved from the
immediate pressure of politics, his mind revertedf
to subjects of decay and quiet dissolution. Inj
66
SHELBOURNE ESSAYS
one of his longer poems, The House of Death, he
has just failed of achieving a work which might
have come from the brain of Poe himself. At
the hour of midnight the poet dreams that he
wanders over a desolate country:
Dark was the sky, and not one friendly star
Shone from the zenith or horizon, clear,
Mist sate upon the woods, and darkness rode
In her black chariot, with a wild career.
And from the woods the late resounding note
Issued of the loquacious whip-poor-will,
Hoarse, howling dogs, and nightly roving wolves
Clamour'd from far off cliffs invisible.
At last he finds himself in the presence of * ' a
noble dome raised fair and high," standing in the
midst of " a mournful garden of autumnal hue ":
The poppy there, companion to repose,
Displayed her blossoms that began to fall,
And here the purple amaranthus rose
With mint strong scented, for the funeral.
In this strange spot, which has something of
the unearthly qualities of Rappaccini's garden or
Poe's spectral landscapes, stands the desolate
home of a young man whose beloved consort
death has recently snatched away, and who now
harbours as a guest the grisly person of Death
himself. Death, stretched on the couch and sur-
rounded by ghoulish phantoms, lies dying. Over
the conversation that ensues and the blasphemies
of the ghastly sufferer we may pass without de-
HAWTHORNE AND POE 67
laying. At last after Death has composed his own
epitaph and described the tomb he is to occupy,
in
A burying-yard of sinners dead, unblest,
the poet flees terror-smitten out of that house
into the tempestuous night.
Nor looked I back, till to a far off wood
Trembling with fear, my weary feet had sped
Dark was the night, but at the enchanted dome
I saw the infernal windows flaming red.
At last the hour of dissolution arrives:
Dim burnt the lamp, and now the phantom Death
Gave his last groans in horror and despair
" All hell demands me hence "he cried, and threw
The red lamp hissing through the midnight air.
Trembling, across the plain my course I held,
And found the grave-yard, loitering through the
gloom,
And, in the midst, a hell-red wandering light,
Walking in fiery circles round the tomb.
Whereupon with a gruesome picture of Death's
interment and a few stanzas of proper exhortation
from the author, this remarkable poem comes to
an end.
Between the period of the Revolution and the
period that may be called the New England ren-
aissance not much was written which has the dis-
tinct mark of the American temperament. Yet it
is a significant fact that Charles Brockden Brown's
68
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Wieland, published in 1798, the first novel of the
first American novelist, should be built upon a
theme as weird and as steeped in * ' thrilling mel-
ancholy," to use Brown's own words, as anything
in the later work of Hawthorne or Poe; and in
the proper place it would not be uninteresting to
show how far, in his imperfect way, Brown antici-
pates the very methods and tricks of his greater
followers. His immediate inspiration comes no
doubt from the mystery-mongering novels then so
popular in England, but despite the crudeness of
a provincial style there does run through the
strange unreality of Brown's pages a note of sin-
cerity, the tongue and accents of a man to whom
such themes are a native inheritance, lending to
his work a sustained interest which I for my part
fail to find in the Castle of Otranto or the Mysteries
of Udolpho. Nor is it without significance that
even in New York, where if anywhere this world
claims her own, Irving in his genial way could
fall so easily into brooding on the dead who sleep
in Westminster Abbey or relate with such gusto
the wild legends of the Hudson. Bryant, too, has
kept his fame chiefly on account of his youthful
musings on death and the grandiose pomp of those
lines that tell how the rock-ribbed hills, the pen-
sive vales, the venerable rivers, brooks,
and, poured around them all,
Old Ocean's grey and melancholy waste,
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.
HAWTHORNE AND POE 69
Necessarily this age-long contemplation of
things unearthly, this divorcing of the imagina-
tion from the fair and blithe harmonies of life to
fasten upon the sombre effects of guilt and repro-
bation, this constant meditation on death and
decay necessarily all these exerted a powerful
influence on literature when the renaissance ap-
peared in New England and as a sort of reflection
in the rest of the country. So, I think, it hap-
pened that out of that famous group of men who
really created American literature the only two to
attain perfection of form in the higher field of the
imagination were writers whose minds were ab-
sorbed by the weirder phenomena of life. But it
must not be inferred thence that the spirit of
Hawthorne and Poe was identical with that of
Michael Wigglesworth and Jonathan Edwards.
With the passage of time the unquestioning, un-
flinching faith and vision of those heroic men dis-
solved away. Already in Freneau, himself born
of a Huguenot family, a change is noticeable;
that which to the earlier Fathers was a matter of
infinite concern, that which to them was more
real and urgent than the breath of life, becomes
now chiefly an intoxicant of the imagination, and
in another generation the transition is complete.
It is this precisely that we understand by the term
" weird" not the veritable vision of unearthly
things, but the peculiar half vision inherited by
the soul when faith has waned and the imagina-
tion prolongs the old sensations in a shadowy
70 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
involuntary life of its own; and herein too lies the
field of true and effective symbolism. If Haw-
thorne and Poe, as we think, possess an element
ol force and realism such as Tieck and the Ger-
man school utterly lack, it is because they write
from the depths of this profound moral experience
of their people
THE INFLUENCE OF EMERSON
IT is a quality of the human spirit on which
Emerson himself was wont to dwell, that it forever
seeks and knows no rest save in death. Almost
it should seem that one cannot acquaint himself
with the history of great religions and philosophies
without falling at last into a state of wondering
indifference or despair, so many times has the
truth appeared to men and been formulated for
the uplifting of a generation, only to give way in
turn to another glimpse of the same haunting
reality. We comfort ourselves with the words
of the poet whom Emerson loved to quote, a
modern version of Pandora:
So strength first made a way:
Then beautie flow'd, then wisdome, honour, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all his treasure
Rest in the bottome lay. . . .
For if I should (said he)
Bestow this Jewell also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature.
So both should losers be.
72 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
When, therefore, we consider how the wisdom
of prophets and philosophers in the past has so
swiftly solidified into a formalism that holds the
weaker in bondage like a strait jacket, and when
we remember how our sage of Concord pointed
out that Christianity too must needs fall into "the
error that corrupts all attempts to communicate
religion," when we reflect on the inevitable course
of human thought, those of us who are lovers of
Emerson as I myself am a lover need feel no
grievance to be told that Emersonianism to-day is
a sign of limitation, not of strength; of palsy, not
of growth. I say Emersonianism, meaning the
influence of Emerson as it works on large masses
of men; but I would not imply that the individual
reader of Emerson may not go to him for ever re-
newed inspiration and assurance in the things of
the spirit. It is always so. The teaching of
Plato was as true in the days of the later Acad-
emy, is as true now, as it was when Socrates
disputed with his disciple in the market-place of
Athens; yet almost in the space of a generation
Platonism became a snare to those who rest in
words and possess no corresponding inner vision
of their own. So Emerson cannot escape his own
condemnation of the wise: ' * Though in our lonely
hours we draw a new strength out of their mem-
ory, yet, pressed on our attention, as they are by
the thoughtless and customary, they fatigue and
invade."
Only there is a difference to observe. The evil
EMERSON 73
which has sprung from other systems of thought
has been due chiefly to the very fact that they
were systems and thus attempted to lay restrain-
ing hands on the ever fluent human spirit. Out
of the pursuit of truth has grown a metaphysic;
out of religious faith has developed a theology.
But with Emerson the opposite is true; the mis-
chief that now works in his name is owing in
large part to his very lack of system. Yet it is
but a shallow reader who would go a step further
and accept Emerson's quizzical profession of in-
consistency without reserve. * * I would write on
the lintels of the door-post, Whim" he said, but
added immediately, ' ' I hope it is somewhat better
than whim at last. ' ' His essays ripple and recoil
on the surface, but underneath there is a current
setting steadily to one point. Indeed I have never
been able to understand the minds of those who,
like Richard Garnett, declare that the separate
sentences in Emerson are clear, but that his essays
as a whole are dark because composed without
any central constructive thought and, in fact,
filled with contradictions. It should seem that
critics who find Emerson self-contradictory are
just those who should never have meddled with
him, for the reason that the guiding and formative
principle in all his work is meaningless to them.
Though often capricious in expression and on the
surface illogical, Emerson, more than almost any
other writer of wide influence, displays that inner
logic which springs from the constant insistence
74 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
on one or two master ideas. The apparent con-
tradictions in his pages need but a moment's re-
flection and a modicum of understanding to reduce
them to essential harmony. L,ike all teachers of
spiritual insight he was profoundly impressed by
the ubiquitous dualism of life. :< Philosophically
considered," he wrote in his first famous mani-
festo, " the universe is composed of Nature and
the Soul." I will not stay to show how this
commonplace of thought becomes fruitful of
varied wisdom through the sincerity and depth
of Emerson's vision. I think, in fact, that any-
one who understands with his heart as well as
with his head the central ideas of the essay on the
Oversoul and of that on Experience will need no
such guidance; he possesses a cue that will carry
him like Ariadne's thread through all the lab}'-
rinth of Emerson's philosophy. Thus of the
Oversoul it is written:
Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the
wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part
and particle is related; . . . this deep power in which
we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, self-
sufficing and perfect in every hour;
and of the Experience of nature it is written:
Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to
illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads,
and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-
coloured lenses which paint the world their own hue,
and each shows only what lies in its own focus.
EMERSON 75
It is characteristic of Kmerson's fine integrity
that he never sought as all systematic philoso-
phies and religions hitherto had attempted to
bridge over the gap between these two realms by
a scheme of ratiocination or revelation. He was
content to let them lie side by side unreconciled,
and hence his seeming fluctuations to those of
shallow understanding. In conduct, however, he i
knew well how to draw the desired lesson from
this dilemma. Indeed, I am not sure that all the
manifold applications of his genius may not be
found summed up in this single paragraph from
his later essay on Fate :
One key, one solution to the mysteries of human con-
dition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom and
foreknowledge, exists, the propounding, namely, of the
double consciousness. A man must ride alternately on
the horses of his private and public nature, as the eques-
trians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse
to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the
other foot on the back of the other. So when a man is
the victim of his fate, has sciatica in his loins, and cramp
in his mind; a club-foot, and a club in his wit; a sour
face, and a selfish temper; a strut in his gait, and a con-
ceit in his affection; or is ground to powder by the vice
of his race; he is to rally on his relation to the Universe,
which his ruin benefits. Leaving the demon who suffers,
he is to take sides with the Deity who secures universal
benefit by his pain.
But because Emerson's thought revolves so
harmoniously about these two central principles,
it does not therefore follow that he has a philoso-
76 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
phical system. Not only does he make no at-
tempt to connect them logically, but he is satisfied
to apply now one and now the other of them to
the solution of a thousand minor questions with-
out much order or method. Hence it is that
readers who carry to his essays a sense for ratioci-
nation but no ultimate vision of truth find him
both contradictory and obscure. And as he neg-
lected to mould his own thought into a system,
so he requires of those who come to him no sys-
tematic preparation. The truth that Emerson
proclaimed is the old, old commonplace that has
arisen before the minds of sages and prophets
from the beginning of time; but they have each
and all conditioned this truth on some discipline of
the reason or the emotions. They have invari-
ably demanded some propaedeutic, some adherence
to a peculiar belief or submission to a divine per-
sonality, before the disciple should be carried into
the inner circle of ennobled experiences. With
Plato it was dialectics; with Buddha it was the
four-fold truth and the eight-fold path and a com-
prehension of the twelve-fold wheel of causation;
with Jesus it was Follow me. And in this system
or discipline we seem to discern an authentication
of their high claims. Bound up as we are with
so many petty concerns, so many demands of the
body, blinded by sloth and made callous by the
conflict of so many material powers, it is hard for
us to accept with more than lip assent this caH to
the life of the spirit. These words that the phil-
EMERSON 77
osophers and prophets utter so glibly are they
not mere words after all, we ask ? Do they signify
any reality of life that a man should barter houses
and land for them ? We need assurance that these
ecstasies and these long contents of the spiritual
man are not idle boasts, and so this discipline of
faith we accept readily as a necessary part of the
scheme of salvation. We have not ourselves par-
taken of such blessings, yet we can imagine that
by some extraordinary means, some nimble gym-
nastics of the brain, we might be raised to these
incredible heights. But now comes this Yankee
prophet, offering the same spiritual exaltations
freely and without condition to all. If we may
believe him, a man shall walk out under the open
sky and breathe the sweet influences of the spirit
as cheaply as he inhales the untainted breeze.
The preacher stands at the meeting of the ways
and cries to all that pass by: Ho, ye who are
wrapt in the swaddling clothes of reverence and
obedience, cast aside these trammels and walk up-
right in your own strength. What have we to do
with the sacredness of tradition ? No law can be
sacred to us but that of our ownjnature. Nay, fol-
low the whim of the hour -/^consistency is the hob-
goblin of little minds. Give me health and a day
and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
I am the owner of the sphere,
Of the seven stars and the solar year,
Of Caesar's hand, and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart, and Shakespeare's strain.
78 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
And the wonder ot it is that no man whose
hearing is not utterly drowned by the clamour of
the world can read a page of these essays without
recognising that Emerson speaks with an abso-
lute and undeceived sincerity. We remember his
confession, that "when a man lives with God,
his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the
brook and the rustle of the corn," and it is with
him as
When the harmony of heaven
Soundeth the measures of a lively faith.
Upon the reader, despite himself it may be, there
steals something of the pure and noble enthusiasm
of the seer, and he knows straightway that the
things of the inner life are real.
If this were all it would be well. If his mes-
sage stood only as a perpetual instigation to the
strong and a noble promise to inspired youth, we
should have much to say of Emerson and little of
Emersonianism. And, in fact, it would be indis-
criminating to lay at Emerson's door the whole
evil of a faded and vulgarised transcendentalism.
He was but one of many; others some, as Chan-
ning, even before his day had taught the same
facility of the spiritual life. Yet in him the move-
ment came to its beautiful flower; we are justified
in holding him mainly responsible for the harm
that flowed from it, as we honour him for the glory
that lay therein. And, alas, even in his own day,
doubtful influence of this fatally easy philo-
EMERSON 79
sophy began to make itself felt. Hawthorne, the
most stalwart observer of all that group, tells us
how many bats and owls, which were sometimes
mistaken for fowls of angelic feather, were at-
tracted by that beacon light of the spirit. It was
moreover impossible, he avows, to dwell in Em-
erson's vicinity without inhaling more or less the
mountain atmosphere of his lofty thought; but in
the brains of some people it wrought a singular
giddiness. And if Emersonianism was mischiev-
ous to weak minds then, what shall we say of its
influence in New England to-day nay, through-
out the whole country ? For it is rampant in our
life; it has wrought in our religion, our politics,
and our literature a perilous dizziness of the
brain.
There is a mysterious faith abroad in the land,
which, however we grudge to say it, is the most
serious manifestation of religion discoverable in
these days. We call it Christian Science, or faith
healing, or what not the gospel of a certain Mrs.
Baker-Eddy; but in reality it does not owe its
strength to the teaching of an ignorant woman in
New Hampshire. It is a diluted and stale pro-
duct of Emersonianism, and the parentage, I
think, is not difficult to discern. To Emerson, as
to Mrs. Baker-Eddy, sin and suffering had no real
existence; a man need only open his breast to the
random influences of heaven to lead the purely_
spiritual life. Nor is it correct to say, as some
fondly suppose, that Christian Science or Emer-
80 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
sonianism has any vital connection with Oriental
mysticism. True, both Emerson and the sages
of the Bast taught that spirit was the only reality
and that the world of the body and of evil was a de-
ception. * * lyife itself is a bubble and a scepticism
and a sleep within a sleep/' said Emerson, and
the Hindu summed up the same thought in his
name for the creator, Miya", illusion. But there
is a radical difference in their attitude to this
truth. Though the material world was in one
sense illusion and unreality to the Hindu, yet in
another sense it was tremendously real. Over the
misery and insufficience of mortal existence he
brooded in a way that to us is inconceivable; we
call him a pessimist, and from our ordinary point
of view rightly. He was haunted as with an in-
finite sadness by the vision of endlessly recurring
birth and death, of ceaseless unmeaning mutation.
To escape this life of unspeakable sorrow he la-
boured at vast systems of philosophy, he was
ready to undergo, if needs were, a lifetime of
crushing asceticism. He could no more have
understood the jaunty optimism of Emerson than
we can understand what we style his pessimism.
There is a story how authentic I do not know
that when Emerson was visiting Carlyle, the gruff
Scotchman, who certainly believed heartily in evil
and damnation, carried his guest to the slums of
lyondon and pointed out to him one horrible sight
after another. ' ' And do you believe in the deil,
noo ? " he would say; and always Emerson would
EMERSON
81
shake his head in gentle denial. The story is at
least ben trovato; it sets forth clearly the facile
optimism out of which Christian Science was to
spring. Such a creed, when professed by one
who spoke with the noble accent and from the
deep insight of an Emerson, was a radiant posses-
sion for seeking humanity forever; it is folly and
inner deception when repeated parrot-like by men
and women with no mental training and, visibly
to all the world, with no warrant of spiritual
experience. To suppose that you and I and our
neighbour can at our sweet will cast off the im-
pediments of sin and suffering is a monstrous^
self-deceit. So has the very lack of system in j
Emerson's message become a snare to mankind I
more deadly than the hardening systems of other I
philosophies. These are at least virile.
It is at best an ungrateful office to lay bare the
harmful influence of a beloved teacher, and I
would hurry over what little remains to be said.
In politics the unreflecting optimism of transcen-
dental Boston has given birth to that unformed
creature called Anti-imperialism. I do not mean
such anti-imperialism as would dispute on the
grounds of expediency our policy in the Philip-
pines or elsewhere this is a question of states-
manship but that * ' Saturnalia or excess of
Faith ' * which wantonly closes the eyes to dis-
tinctions and would see a Washington in every
Aguinaldo. It is a blinking of the eyes to those"!
* 'unconcerning things, matters of fact, ' ' in political /
6
82 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
fitness as Christian Science was in moral fit-
ness; it is the glorification of untried human
nature preached by Channing, made beautiful by
Emerson, acted by the Abolitionists, and reduced
to the absurd by Mr. Atkinson. And the same
optimism has made itself felt in recent New Eng-
land literature. " The vision of genius comes by
renouncing the too officious activity of the under-
standing and giving leave and amplest privilege
to the spontaneous sentiment," wrote Emerson;
and again, " The poet must be a rhapsodist, his
inspiration a sort of casualty;" and yet again,
" The Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its
works and will travel a royal road to particular
knowledges and powers;" excellent doctrine for
a Shakespeare or an Emerson, a noble source of
inspiration for all, indeed; but conceive the havoc
it might work, has indeed actually wrought, when
accepted literally by writers of a single talent. I
was impressed recently by a criticism in the Lon-
don Times which held up to ridicule the cheap
enthusiasms, the utter want of discrimination be-
tween inspiration and twaddle, the flaccid sublimi-
ties, of a certain book by Lilian Whiting, which
deals with the literary memories of those old Bos-
ton Days. It set me to reflecting on the widespread
mischief done to New England writing of to-day
by this self-abandonment to ecstasy and this easy
acceptance of genius wherever it proclaims itself
in New England at least. Pessimism is morbid
and stationary, but I sometimes think that the
EMERSON 83
black hopelessness of a Leopardi would be better
than this self-deceit of a facile optimism.
But enough. I feel already something of that
shame which must have fallen upon the advocatus
diaboli constrained by his office to utter a protest
against the saints. Yet I trust my words will not
be taken as directed against the sweet spirit of
Emerson, whom I reverence this side idolatry; I
have merely written on the ancient text, Corruptio
optimi pessima .
P.S. This essay was published in the Independent in
connection with the centenary of Emerson's birth, May
25, 1903, and immediately drew from Mrs. Bddy a pro-
mulgation setting forth to all the world the extent of
her education and denouncing the idea that Christian
Science owes anything to Emerson, or to Greek or Ro-
man. She and God alone, it appears, are to be accredited
with this new faith. In view of the fact that Mrs. Eddy
now numbers her disciples by the million many of them
educated and thoughtful people we regard this promul-
gation as one of the most extraordinary documents in
the history of religion.
"I was early," she says, "the pupil of Miss Sarah J.
Bodwell, the principal of Sanbornton Academy of New
Hampshire, and finished my course of studies under
Prof. Dyer H. Sanborn, author of Sanborn's Grammar.
Among my early studies were Comstock's Natural Phi-
losophy, chemistry, Blair's Rhetoric, Whateley's Logic,
Watts's On the Mind and Moral Science. At sixteen
years of age I began writing for leading newspapers, and
for many years wrote for the best magazines in the South
and North. I have lectured in large and crowded halls
in New York City, Chicago, Boston, Portland, and at
84 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Waterville College, arid have been invited to lecture in
London and Edinburgh. In 1883 1 started the Christian
Science Journal, and for several years was the proprietor
and sole editor of that journal. In 1893 Judge S. J.
Hanna became editor of the Christian Science Journal,
and for ten subsequent years he knew my ability as an
editor. In his recent lecture at Chicago, he said: 'Mrs.
Eddy is, from every point of view, a woman of sound
education and liberal culture ' . . .
"I am the author of the Christian Science text book,
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures^ and the
demand for this book increases, and the book is already
in its two hundred and seventy-fourth edition of one
thousand copies each. I am rated in the National
Magazine ( 1903) as ' standing the eighth in a list of
twenty-two of the foremost living authors.' "But withal
she is modest. "I claim," she concludes, "no special
merit of any kind. All that I am in reality God has
made me."
Fatuity has not often gone beyond this. Tantum
religio potuit suadere ineptidrum.
THE SPIRIT OF
AT last, with the publication of the New Letters
of Thomas Carlyle? we have a complete survey of
his correspondence from the early schoolmaster
days when he was teaching mathematics " with
some potential outlook on Divinity as ultimatum,"
to the last waiting years at Chelsea of the acknow-
ledged prophet to whom the final mercy of God
seemed that " He delivers us from a life which
has become a task too hard. ' ' The earlier volumes
of the series were edited by Professor Norton, the
last two by Carlyle's nephew, both editors being
avowedly hostile to Carlyle's biographer, the care-
less, the much maligned, James Anthony Froude,
As for the long quarrel that has been waged be-
tween the heirs of Froude and Carlyle, let us hope
that this disgraceful chapter in our literary history
has been closed, and forever. The most unfor-
tunate episode of this Battle of the Books was the
recent publication by his heirs of a pamphlet which
had been written by Froude under the influence
of that morbid meddler, Miss Geraldine Jewsbury,
1 New Letters of Thomas Carlyle. Edited and anno-
tated by Alexander Carlyle. 2 vols. New York: John
Lane, 1904.
85
86 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
and which contained charges against Carlyle of an
astounding and revolting nature. In itself the
pamphlet was harmless. No one whose psycho-
logical perception was not for the moment de-
ranged could read the early letters of Carlyle to
his wife, or indeed follow any part of his career,
without being utterly convinced of his virility.
But in another sense the pamphlet might have
done a great wrong; its silliness and falsehood
were of a kind to discredit all that Froude had
written about his master, and so to destroy our
confidence in one of the two great biographies of
the language. We might have been forced to be-
lieve that the Life of Carlyle was written by a
knave as the Johnson, according to Macaulay,
was written by a fool. The work of Froude' s en-
emies has relieved us of this difficulty. By pub-
lishing the Letters and Reminiscences in authentic
form they have indeed proved that Froude made
innumerable errors in detail, that his methods as
an historian were extraordinary, often unaccount-
able (which, for that matter, was well enough
known before), that in some respects he empha-
sised unwarrantably the harsher side of Carlyle' s
character; but they have also and unwillingly
shown that Froude, despite his blunders, despite
the scandal of the recent pamphlet, did succeed
nevertheless in writing a biography no less re-
markable for its insight into character than for its
artistic form. After reading the ten volumes
edited by Professor Norton and Mr. Alexander
CARLYLE 87
Carlyle and then turning again to Froude's biog-
raphy, one may well be impressed by the masterly
manner in which that great writer has seized on
thejreal Carlyle, which lies half concealed in the
letters, and set him forth in all the clear relief of
supreme craftsmanship. The rugged sage of
Chelsea looms up as tremendous in English lit-
erature as the burly dictator of the earlier century
and it is withal a true picture. It is quite prob-
able that the bulk of Carlyle' s work will be little
read in the future, as has happened with Johnson;
his unflagging vehemence, his determination to
seize always on the emotional content of each fact,
do certainly render his histories monotonous.
But in the record of his life he will continue, like
Johnson, to amuse, to instruct, and to dominate.
There lives his personality which the world can-
not afford to neglect; there, too, speaks the elo-
quent message of the man. I have thought that
it would not be amiss to point out the two peculiar
traits of his character whose conjunction, it has
seemed to me, accounts for thejomination of his
spirit over. Jth&Jis^r_ minds of the age^ and whose
mutual incompatibility brought about the pitiful
tragedy of his domestic life.
''In part the fascination of Carlyle' s character
and writings springs from a quality rarely found
among Anglo-Saxons, from that sense of illusion
which we call Oriental and which is really the
basis of Hindu religion. It is a sense far removed
from the ordinary bustling practical intelligence
88 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
// )of Britain and America, a form of mysticism, as
we vaguely call it, which is spurned under that
all-comprehensive word un-English or un-Ameri-
can, which yet here and there crops up unaccount-
ably in our greater poets. To Shakespeare, most
of all, the feeling came often with strange effect in
the midst of his stormy passions; and it is not by
chance that Carlyle's favourite quotation was that
outcry of Macbeth at the end of a tumultuous
career : " To-morrow, and To-morrow, and To-
morrow ! " To him, as to Macbeth, life was "but
a walking shadow." Sufficient emphasis has
hardly been laid upon this phase of Carlyle's
mind. Froude must have recognised it in a way,
for the selections he makes use of from the letters
and journals are filled with the sense of spectral
vision, yet nowhere does he point out definitely the
kinship between his master and those eremites
of ancient India who, in pursuit of that great
silence which Carlyle preached so vociferously,
withdrew for meditation to the solitary groves and
mountain caves. Not Bhartrihari himself, the
philosopher king of Oujjein, was more haunted
by the bewildering phantasmagoric aspect of the
world than this peasant-born son of Ecclefechan.
;^L,ife in well-ordered England was to Carlyle a
[struggle with " the whirlwind and wild piping
(battle of fate." Everywhere it was the same;
whether at Craigenputtock or by the weltering
sea or in the roaring streets of London** he was
awed by the noisy insignificance of the world
CARLYLE 89
swimmi^jthrough_ the_void .__ofLspac,e, by the
frantic unrest of the heart of man looking out
upon the eternal repose of the hills, by the clam-
orous _discord of human life beneath the great
\silences of the sky; everywhere he moved among
[spectres and illusions.*' Walking at night over the
moors about his Craigenputtock home, he found
it " silent, solitary as Tadmor in the wilderness;
yet the infinite vault still over it, and the earth a
little ship of space in which he was sailing."
Later in life he visits the old birthplace at Kccle-
fechan, and there on the road sits for a while
alone, looking across to the Cumberland moun-
tains and calling up the shadows of the past.
" Tartarus itself," he said, " and the pale king-
doms of Dis, could not have been more preter-
natural to me most stern, gloomy, sad, grand
yet terrible, yet steeped in woe." More-eften
amid, the solemn scenes of nature the illusion of
mart's discordant fate sank away beneath the
brooding presence of the infinite. Very beautiful
in feeling is the passage quoted by Froude from a
letter written at lyinlathen: " Yesternight, before
sunset, I walked solitary to Stockbridge hilltop,
the loneliest road in all Britain, where you go and
come some three miles without meeting a human
soul. Strange, earnest light lay upon the moun-
tain-tops all round, strange clearness; solitude as
if personified upon the near bare hills, a silence
j everywhere as if premonitory of the grand eternal
/ one. ' ' Was he thinking of Goethe's ' ' Ueber alien
90 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Gipfeln 1st Ruh," when lie wrote ? That may not
be known, but one thing is certain: It is because
Froude had the wisdom to build up his biography
on such excerpts as this that it presents a true
and momentous portrait of the man; and con-
versely it is because Mr. Alexander Carlyle omits
this letter and others like it (they were written
during a period of estrangement between Carlyle
and his wife) that his collection is of secondary
interest, and really belittles the man he attempts
to magnify.
'But it was in London Carlyle feltjhe inscruta-
ble mystery of life weigh upon him as a hideous
nightmare. There the world looked " often quite
Spectral" to him. " It is and continues a wild
wondrous chaotic den of discord, this L,ondon,"
he writes. " I am often wae and awestruck at
once to wander along its crowded streets, and see
and hear the roaring torrent of men and animals
and carriages and wagons, all rushing they know
not whence, they know not whither! " It is not
strange that he often felt himself ' ' the loneliest of
all the sons of Adam," or that " in the jargon of
poor grimacing men" he seemed to listen " to the
jabbering of spectres."' One day, while the spirit
of the French Revolution is upon him, he calls at
Mrs. Austin's, where he hears "Sydney Smith
for the first time guffawing, other persons prating,
jargoning. He writes of it in his journal, and
adds : "To me through these thin cobwebs Death
and Eternity sate glaring" Often, as I read of
CARLYLE 91
Carlyle and reflect how life to him was a perilous
journey through phantoms and fiery thronging
illusions, I recall passages of the Hindu books,
and one epigram in particular comes to my mind:
Seated within this body's car
The silent Self is driven afar;
And the five senses at the pole
Like steeds are tugging, restive of control.
And if the driver lose his way,
Or the reins sunder, who can say
In what blind paths, what pits of fear
Will plunge the chargers in their mad career?
And in another way Carlyle was filled with the
Oriental spirit. To him, as to the philosophers
of India, only one fact was certain in this ever-
shifting mirage of our worldly life. Running
h rough it all was the unvarying moral law^of
use and effect : what a man sowed that should
he inevitably reap. It is not necessary to dwell
on this point, forKio one can read a page of Car-
lyle' s writings without learning that the very
warp and woof of his doctrine were the tremend-
ous certainty of virtue anjLyice, of the retributive
law of fusticeT^Sometimes he expresses this sense
o the indwelling reality in the old terms of God
and Providence which he had inherited in his
Scottish home; at other times he speaks in the
more mystical manner of the East, as if an im-
personal law of morality wrought witETn us and
e
92 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
created our destiny. In that passage quoted
above, in which he describes the bewildering
phantasmagoria of the London streets, he adds:
i\" Nevertheless, there is a deep, divine meaning
I in it, and God is in the midst of it, had we but
(leyes to see." And elsewhere a thousand times
in his letters and formal works he expresses the
same sentiment. Here alone lay the lesson and
significance of history, in the terrible assurance
of retribution following hard upon transgression
of the ten commandments. "All history is a
Bible," he says, and adds somewhat plaintively
that he has preached this solemn doctrine through
; a lifetime, but only to deaf ears. This it was that
made the French Revolution, to his mind, the
most significant event in Tfuhian affairs; others
saw in that catastrophe the awakening of liberty;
Carlyle beheld only a stern Providence dealing
retribution to a sinful people. ' ' I should not have
known what to make of this world at all," he
ejaculates, " if it had not been for the French
Revolution." And his history of that upheaval
is nothing other than a lyric rhapsody over the
illusion of life, the cant and mockery of words,
pierced through and through by the wrath of the
divine reality. "Xhe men and women of his pages
are spectres hounded by the loud Furies. The
vision of the whole is as it were pictures of fire
thrown on a curtain of seething cloud. In a letter
to Thomas Krskine (which, it may be noted, is
not included in the collection made by Mr. Alex-
CARLYLE 93
ander Carlyle) tie sums up the truth which he felt
it his mission to preach :
The great soul of this world is Just. With a voice soft
as the harmony of the spheres, yet stronger, sterner, than
all thunders, this message does now and then reach us
through the hollow jargon of things. This great fact we
live in, and were made by.
Nor was his attitude toward the individual in
any way different from his understanding of his-
tory. For himself he seemed to be swathed and
" embated " in enchantments from which no man
could deliver him until death freed him once for
all. " One thing in the midst of this chaos," he
writes, * ' I can more and more determine to adhere
to it is now almost my sole rule of life to clear
myself of cants and formulas as of poisonous
Nessus shirts; to strip them off me, by what name
soever called, and follow, were it down to Hades,
what I myself know and see." And several times
he recurs to this conception of himself as a weary
Hercules, struggling with the venomed shirts of
illusion that wrapt his soul about. Here, too, lies
the explanation of his much- reiterated doctrine of
work. 'He first, apparently got the lesson from
Goethe, to whom work was a kind of glorified
prudential means of attaining happiness and self-
development, but soon carried it into a region
quite beyond the great German's range of vision.
In the midst of innumerable mockeries and decep-
tions he perceived one absolute certainty that
94 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
the deeds of man wove influences about him which
| were the creation of his destiny X This was the
law of justice that remained steadfast, though all
the religious imaginings of Jew and Gentile were
swept away, and Jove and Jehovah faded into
oblivion. Through all his doubts he proclaimed
this mystic gospel of Work with appalling vocif-
eration. One is reminded again of the creed of
those philosophers of India to whom Carlyle in so
many ways bore a strangely distorted likeness.
From the preacher of L,ondon shouting his mes-
sage through the din of our Western civilisation, I
turn to Bhartrihari and read his quaint epigrams,
written, we may suppose, after he had retired from
the throne and sought the silence and seclusion of
his cavern dwelling beyond the houses of Oujjein:
Before the Gods we bend in awe,
But lo, they bow to fate's dread law:
Honour to Fate, then austere lord !
But lo, it fashions but our works' reward.
Nay, if past works our present state
Engender, what of gods and fate ?
Honour to Works ! in them the power
Before whose awful nod even fate must cower.
No wonder that with such a burden to deliver
Carlyle found himself like one crying in the wild-
erness. Men listened and were startled from their
lethargy; they honoured him with the name of
prophet, and gaped upon him with a vague dread,
but in the end they shook their heads and turned
CARLYLE 95
away as from an inspired madman. It may be
that the message of Carlyle was the old truth of
the sages announced in a new and astounding
form; certainly it was in every way diametrically
opposed to the current of belief that swept through
the nineteenth century. Those were the days
when science was reaching forth to usurp the
kingdom of thought. Evolution announced that
the material world alone was governed by immut-
able and discoverable laws, and that morality was
based on the ever-shifting quicksands of custom
and tradition; Carlyle perceived in the phenomena
of life only thin cobwebs, wherethrough Death
and Eternity sate glaring, whereas the moral law
alone was unchangeable, founded on the everlast-
ing rock of truth. As a people we have entrusted
our destiny to Darwin and Spencer and Huxley,
and to Carlyle we have granted the dubious praise
of having written Literature /* *Nor was he in any
closer sympathy with the religious aims of the day.
That was the time, on the one hand, of Puseyism
and the Oxford movement which undertook to
counteract the scepticism of science by an appeal
to tradition and the influence of imaginative sym-
bols, and, on the other hand, of the strenuous re-
ligion of Maurice and Kingsley, who sought to
smother doubts in restless activity. Towards both
movements Carlyle was perfectly cold, even scorn-
ful. These good men seemed to him to be delib-
erately forging self-deceptions to take the place of
the old faith, and his answer to their challenge
96 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
was a fierce proclamation of " the Exodus from
Houndsditch/'^In w< ^oJiitiQ he was, if possible,
still more opposed to the current of the age. De-
mocracy was then gathering up her strength for
the long and apparently victorious struggle with
inherited powers and principalities. The ballot
box was to be the guarantee of righteous govern-
ment, and the will of the majority was in all
things to rule supreme. Carlyle believed that the
multitude of men were blinded with the illusions
of this world, and that to trust to their j udgment
was like leaving the guidance of a rudderless
vessel to the waves of the sea. He would stand
neither with Radicals nor Tories. To the former
he preached the instability of all mobs; to the lat-
ter he pointed out the sufferings of the poor, and
the idle, fox-hunting habits of the aristocracy.
I He saw salvation for the people only where a
j strong man ruled by right of the divine reality
j speaking through him. When asked who was to
determine whether the strong man was the good
man, whether might was right, he exclaimed sav-
agely that hell-fire would be the judge, as it had
already judged in the French Revolution. ^
In every dispute the world, after its ancient
manner, decided against him in its own favour.
It would not be easy to name a single great ques-
tion or tendency of the age which was in any way
guided or balked by his vehement prophesying.
If his influence was deep and undeniable, it was
due to that curious dualism that exists in most
CARLYLE 97
of us between our public and our private con-
science. Men-listened to his social denunciations
with amazement or with mockery; there was no
room for his mysticism in the spirit of compromise
and utilitarianism that governed, and no doubt
must always govern, public affairs. But in pri-
vate, when the individual man turned from the
clamour of opinions to meditate in the secret
chamber of his thought, then the words of Carlyle
penetrated to the heart with the authority of that
voice, still and small, yet stronger, sterner than
all thunders, that none shall hear and with im-
punity disobey. ^To those who are absorbed in
the philosophy of this world Carlyle's doctrine has
had no meaning and probably will never have a
meaning ; to one who reflects apart and seeks a
solitary law for his own guidance, Carlyle will
long remain, as he stands revealed in Froude's
pages, a revered friend and a dreaded mentor.
The wonder is not that Carlyle's political and
religious theories went unheeded, but that he
himself received publicly such honour in the land
as a prophet. That is a paradox which sprang
from a contradiction in his own nature. He com-
pelled men to listen to him by that strange union
of qualities which was at once his strength and
his weakness. His preaching in part was not un-
like the philosophy of those Indian gymnosophists
who from Alexander's day to ours have been a
marvel and a disturbing doubt to the Occident.
But to the Hindus' belief in the illusion of life and
98 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
in the mystic dominion of Works, he added an
emotional cQns.cioJA3ng&s utterly foreign to their
temper. ' This was an exaggerated and highly
irritable sense of his individual personality.*/ Now
the personal character of a man, as we of the
West understand it, was to the Hindu a transitory
composite, a mere aspect of the general illusion;
while the Hebrew, with his purely concrete in-
telligence, carried the idea into the very heavens,
and made of his Jehovah the most intense person-
ality the human brain has ever conceived. The
combination of these two ways of viewing the
world, the outer sense of illusion joined to an
aggravated self-consciousness, gave that peculiar
poignancy to Carlyle's preaching which we all
feel, but do not always stop to analyse. Never
before perhaps has the world listened to the mystic
philosophy of illusion thundered forth with the
virulence and tremendous vehemence of a Jere-
miah or an Ezekiel. It was, of course, the He-
brew element in his character that impressed and
for a while cowed his British audience; it was the
Hindu mysticism that rendered his doctrine utterly
unavailing in the end to influence the current of
public opinion.
If this self-contradiction of Carlyle's views cre-
ated the singular paradox of a prophet publicly
feared but unheeded, it wrought only disaster in
his domestic life. I think one need not go be-
yond this union of warring traits to comprehend
the tumult of Carlyle's own conscience and the
CARLYLE 99
more pathetic tragedy of his marriage. We can
easily believe him when he says he is no man
" whom it is desirable to be too close to.'VHe
moved in a nightmare of fantastic unrealities and
heard only the "jabbering of spectres," but with
his exacerbated egotism he could not wave them
aside as mere shadows, and rise to the calm of
that higher self which can smile unconcerned at
the idle illusion. He was among them and of
them; they beat upon his brain and tortured his
nerves, until he cried out like a bewildered, much-
^buffeted Titan. " My heart," he exclaimed, " is
mrnt with fury and indignation when I think of
iing cramped and shackled and tormented as
lever man till me was. ' ' The very trivialities of
life must loom up tremendously, like the distorted
images seen through a mist/ The very beasts
and dumb things of the earth became a part of the
infernal Walpurgis Night that weltered about
him, and the human beings that thwarted him
were emissaries of Satan. When he hears a
watchman in Edinburgh proclaim the passing of
the hours, the man is transformed into a demon.
"There was one of those guardians there," he
says in a letter, " whose throat I could have cut
that night; his voice was loud, hideous, and ear
aiid soul piercing, resembling the voices of ten
fcousand gib-cats all molten into one terrific
peal." He travels in Germany, and the beds
wring a scream from him like that of a man
broken on the rack. His warfare against his
IOO SHELBURNE ESSAYS
neighbour's cocks has become a part of history,
and when workmen entered his Chelsea house he
fled as if the horrors of the Inferno had broken in
upon him. There is, of course, an element of
humorous exaggeration in his complaints; grim,
stentorian humour was indeed the natural product
of a brain so strangely and contradictorily com-
pacted. But to himself and to his wife the merri-
ment must have sounded too often like the reputed
laughter of the pit. "Ah me! People ought not
to be angry at me," he writes in a letter to Jane.
" People ought to let me alone. Perhaps they
would if they rightly understood what I was
doing and suffering in this L,ife Pilgrimage at
times."
It is folly to-day to enter into that domestic un-
happiness and take sides for one or the other of
the sufferers; if we rightly understand Carlyle
there will be no room left for anger; nor, on the
other hand, shall we attempt to transfer the blame
of the unhappiness wholly from his shoulders to
lers. It is well to remember, also, how often the
lemonic nature of the world and of his own tor-
tured personality sank away and left him at
peace; how often the illusion of life detached
itself from his own morbid egotism and appeared
as a scene of infinite pathos, a matter for tears and
not for execrations. At these times his heart went
out in tenderness, and his letters to Jane and to
others are filled with exquisite love and simple
sweetness such as no other letters of the language
CARLYLE IOI
can parallel. If we were compelled to select a
single passage which showed the real character
of the man, with its depth and brooding insight,
we might well quote these words, which he wrote
to his brother John:
Last night I sat down to sm^kf in my nightshirt -in
the^back yard. It was one of the beautifullest nights;
the half-moon, clear as silver looked out as from eternity,
and the great dawn was streaming up. I felt a remorse,
a kind of shudder, at the fuss I was making about a
sleepless night, about my sorrow at all, with a life so
soon to be absorbed into the great mystery above and
around me. Oh ! let us be patient. Let us call to God
with our silent hearts, if we cannot with our tongues.
There the unrest of his soul dies away and the
clear serenity of the philosopher speaks out.
I have thus attempted to find a key to the
peculiar .paradox of Carlyle's life and writings in
the extraordinary union within one man of the
spirit of the Hindu seer and the Hebrew prophet
; although of direct influence from India there is,
of course, no suggestion intended. It would not
be difficult, indeed, to show that something of
this paradoxical temperament is inherent in the
Scotch character, and that Carlyle inherited it
from his people and his surroundings as he
acquired the remarkable qualities of his style.
The transition from the pages of such writers as
John Knox and Rutherford and Peden and
Hutcheson to his own consummate eloquence is
less marked than might commonly be supposed.
102 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
But beyond such inheritance lies the genius of the
man himself, the mystery of his brain, which no
study of tradition or acquisition will explain. He
stands in Froude's biography a figure unique, iso-
lated, domineering after Dr. Johnson the greatest
personality in English letters, possibly even more
imposing than that acknowledged dictator.
THE SCIENCE OF ENGLISH VERSE
MR. MARK H. LIDDKU*, formerly of the Uni-
versity of Texas, has written a little book ' on the
scientific study of English poetry which is not
without interesting suggestions. It is a pity,
however, that he should have adopted a tone of
such revolutionary violence as is likely to dis-
credit what is really valuable in his work. There
were brave men before Agamemnon's time, and
there have been ' ' scientific ' ' students of verse
even before this present year of grace. And is it
quite prudent for a writer on a subject which has
been treated by a succession of sincere scholars
through many centuries to assert so frankly, what-
ever his secret thoughts may be, that all who
preceded him were mere indulgers in empty meta-
physics, silly idolaters before those awful idola of
error which Bacon discovered and laid bare in the
market-place and elsewhere? "The conclusion
of the whole matter," says Mr. L,iddell at the end
of his treatise, * ' points but in one direction the
1 An Introduction to the Scientific Study of English
Poetry. By Mark H. Liddell. New York: Doubleday,
Page & Co. 1902.
103
IO4 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
necessity of considering literature as material of
science, and not as a subject for pleasant talk."
Now Mr. Liddell's consideration of literature as
material of science is divided into two parts, the
first having to do with a general discussion of the
elements of poetry, the second being confined
more exclusively to rhythm in verse. In sum-
ming up the argument of the first part he ex-
presses himself as follows (p. 140):
The general notion of poetry we thus obtained was:
ideas normally formulated in the terms of correlated
sound-group-images, possessing the general and abiding
human interest of literature, and rendered aesthetically
interesting by being couched in recognisably aesthetic
Verse Form. Or, stated as a formula: x + HI + VF.
Evidently the author has been at some pains to
avoid " pleasant talk" and to be strictly scientific.
He lets x stand for the underlying idea of the
poem, HI for its human interest, and VF for its
verse form. A poem, in other words, must con-
tain some thought or idea expressed in normal
language; it must further possess some general
human interest; and it must be in verse form.
Why, of course; we all know that. M. Jourdain,
in the play, was amazed to learn that he had been
speaking prose all his life; on translating Mr.
L,iddell's formula we are flattered to find that we
have been thinking, if not speaking, science all
along without ever suspecting it. The pity of it
is that our dulness should have required one
ENGLISH VERSE 10$
hundred and forty pages of strenuous argument
to receive such enlightenment. And, seriously,
is it not regrettable that jargon of this kind should
be allowed to drown some really clever bits of
criticism? For instance, the contrast instituted
(p. 30 ff.) between Shakespeare's " After life's
fitful fever he sleeps well ' ' and the same thought
in prose form, is neatly done and is interesting,
though it may contain nothing that borders on
revolutionary originality.
But it is the second part of the book which
forms the heart of Mr. Liddell's argument; and
if I have seemed to dwell at too great length on
the introductory matter, it was in the desire to
set forth the peculiar tone that has crept into the
scientific discussion of rhythm from various
literary sources. It is in this second part that the
author pours out the vials of his wrath against
his predecessors who were reckless enough to
contradict him by anticipation. Indeed, the de-
sired dispassionateness of scientific research is
more than once broken in these pages by a re-
crudescence of the old and rancorous debate be-
tween the ancients and the moderns. That debate
was amusing when Swift sent forth his Battle of
the Books; it is hardly amusing to-day. And
then it is so likely to carry a man away from
calm investigation into dreary outbreaks of the
odium philologicum. Any one not blinded by this
malign disease might see, you would suppose,
that the contestants on both sides are equally
IO6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
wrong- headed both those who frenetically deny
any similarity between classic and English
rhythms, and those who obstinately uphold their
complete identity.
As for the upcropping of this odium philologicum
in the present treatise, one wonders a little at the
wherefore. Part of its animus, no doubt, is due
to the author's inadequate knowledge of the
classics. For instance, a very little reading would
have prevented such a categorical statement as
this (p. 112), "But [in contrast to the English]
there is ample evidence to show that an absolute
and fixed proportion [between long and short
syllables] did exist in the classic languages; " or
this (p. 65), " We shall look in vain in Greek
poetry for an aesthetic appeal based upon varia-
tions of intensity of syllables." Aristoxenus,
more than two thousand years ago, exposed the
folly of that first error; and as for the second, the
weight of evidence is strongly in favour of sup-
posing that the feet in a Greek verse were marked
off by a slight * ' intensity of syllables." That (p.
26) the author speaks disparagingly of the "vatus
insanus," we would willingly charge to negligent
proof-reading were it not that elsewhere (p. 294)
he, though a professed student of Shakespeare,
misquotes the bard so as to achieve the rhythm,
" O nymph, in thy o-rz-sons."
But in part Mr. Liddell's celestial ire against
the classics is justified by the infinite confusion
wrought in English prosody by the ill-advised
ENGLISH VERSE IOJ
critics, from Gabriel Harvey down, who have
failed to distinguish between the nature of quan-
titative measure in Greek and in the Teutonic
languages. So irritating is this confusion to Mr.
lyiddell's Anglo-Saxon sensibilities that he goes
to the other extreme, and denies that the length
or shortness of an English syllable has anything
whatsoever to do with the forms of English verse
although he does elsewhere admit grudgingly
the existence of quantitative distinctions in Eng-
lish pronunciation. Rhythm, he thinks, is in no-
wise determined by the measurement of time but
by the counting off of accented and unaccented
syllables. Just why he should involve this in-
complete and often exploded theory in such a fury
of hard language, it is not easy to say. Perhaps
he deems it scientific to be obscure. ' ' We have
determined," he writes in conclusion (p. 310),
1 ' that the fundamental element of our English
verse-punctuation is that concomitant of ideation
which we have called attention-stress." This is
a ' * scientific ' ' (it seems rather metaphysic) state-
ment which may be interpreted to the merely
literary by explaining that " verse- punctuation"
means feet; that " attention-stress " means stress
or accent, which of course catches the attention;
and that " concomitant of ideation " implies that
the accent is governed by the thought. To
such a pass has the odium philologicum brought
us!
The wonder of it all is that so simple a matter
108 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
as verse-rhythm should have raised so noisy a
commotion. I am myself tempted to discuss the
subject briefly, affecting some assurance of tone
not because I hope to introduce scientific accuracy
where hitherto empty rhetoric has reigned su-
preme, but contrariwise because the whole subject
has already received such adequate treatment by
others. From three readily accessible books one
may learn all that is essential to English prosody
The Science of English Verse, by Sidney L,anier;
Chapters on Greek Metric, by T. W. Goodell; and
Englische Metrik, by J. Schipper. Lanier's bril-
liant work is unexceptionable as a study of the
ideal or model verse, but fails to consider the vari-
ance between the ideal and the actual rhythm. A
large part of Prof. Goodell' s volume deals with
this very question, and thus supplements L,anier's
theory. Prof. Goodell is concerned primarily
with Greek rhythms, but in his third chapter he
gives the clearest and sanest discussion of rhythm
in general that I have yet seen and to my sorrow
I have read much on the subject. Dr. Schipper 's
volumes form a work of vast Gelehrsamkeit and
are invaluable as a storehouse of material.
But as a text for my explanation I choose rather
to take the statement of one who certainly cannot
be accused of deficient science, of one who is in-
deed recognised by the scientific world as the
highest possible authority in all questions of
sound. In Helmholtz's Tonempfindungen these
words may be found (Ellis' s Translation, p. 388):
ENGLISH VERSE 1 09
The scientific, as well as all other measurement of
time, depends on the rhythmical recurrence of similar
events, the revolution of the earth or moon, or the swings
of a pendulum. Thus also the regular alternation of
accentuated and unaccentuated sounds in music and
poetry gives the measure of time for the composition.
But whereas in poetry the construction of the verse
serves only to reduce the external accidents of linguistic
expression to artistic order; in music, rhythm, as the
measure of time, belongs to the inmost nature of expres-
sion. Hence also a much more delicate and elaborate
development of rhythm was required in music than in
verse.
From this genuinely scientific statement the
three laws of verse-rhythm may be formulated as
follows:
I. Rhythm in verse is not the product of either
classical or Anglo-Saxon pedantry, but is a branch
of acoustics and is amenable to the great rhythmic
law of nature.
II. Rhythm in verse, like all rhythm, is a
measurement of time marked off by the regular
recurrence of similar events.
III. Rhythm in verse is a mere approximation,
much less absolute and regular than rhythm in
music, which is nearest akin to it.
L,et us examine these three laws in order.
I. First of all, then, rhythm in verse is a branch
of the scientific study of sound, and has nothing
to do with grammar or logic or numbers or
thought. It is as amenable to law as any other
phenomenon within the realm of acoustics. To
1 10 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
speak of rhythm in numbers or the rhythm of
thought is a mere metaphorical use of words, an
introduction of metaphysics where science should
reign. Rhythm may be an instrument to express
thought or emotion, and in this way thought or
emotion may govern rhythm; but the rhythm re-
mains as distinct from the thought or emotion as
the swaying of our limbs from the nerve impulse
that moves them. Rhythm is purely a matter of
the senses. Doggerel verses which convey no
meaning may still be highly rhythmical.
II. Now every appeal to the senses must be
some act of energy perceived through the media
of space and time. Symmetry has to do with
phenomena as determined in space; rhythm, with
phenomena as determined in time. To distin-
guish: Suppose a man at a blackboard to be
drawing a continuous line. If this line in the
end produces a regularly repeated figure, the de-
sign is symmetrical. The time of the drawing
and the rapidity of the man's movements are not
here concerned. If, however, the figure traced
be without design, but if the drawer at regular in-
tervals of time makes some peculiar and repeated
movement with his hand, then the resulting figure
drawn will not be symmetrical, but the motion of
the drawer's hand while drawing will be rhythmi-
cal. Symmetry is static, rhythm is kinetic.
The commonest form of rhythm is, of course,
*** rkythm of sound. And here let it be noted
that such rhythm is not a mere division of time
ENGLISH VERSE III
(which would be a metaphysical conception), but
a division of sound in time. To illustrate: A
succession of perfectly similar sounds at regular
intervals of time is not rhythmical. There is in-
herently no rhythm in a succession of equal drum
beats at intervals of a second, or in a regular suc-
cession of indistinguishable whistles. To produce
rhythm, you must mark off certain sounds so as
to divide the series into groups occupying equal
measures of time. For example, there is rhythm
in the drum beats to which we march; there would
be rhythm in a succession of whistles such as an
engine emits on approaching a road.
There are three properties of sound which may
be so used in marking off these groups. At
regular intervals of time the sound may be dis-
tinguished from the others (i) by duration, or (2)
by pitch, or (3) by stress or loudness. The first
rhythm would undoubtedly be the weakest, the
third would be the strongest. Any combination
would be still stronger, as tending to mark off the
intervals of time more emphatically to the ear.
Now this rhythmic sense is one of the most in-
sistent in human nature, so insistent that, given
any regular succession of sounds, it produces the
illusion of rhythm when none actually exists.
For instance, it is impossible to listen to the tick-
ing of a clock without imagining some difference
between the alternate strokes such as will mark
off the sounds into rhythmic groups. Every
other stroke seems to be at once a little longer, a
112 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
little higher in pitch, and louder tic tac, tic tac,
tic tac, etc. That this difference of sound is
imaginary becomes evident from the ease with
which we may vary the succession at will. The
conclusion is this: Rhythm exists only when some
diversity of sound marks off regular intervals of
time within each of which some sound occurs.
The application of this law to language is per-
fectly simple. Here the equal measurement of
time is determined: (i) by the regular recurrence
of syllables distinguished in length, in which case
the rhythm may be called quantitative ; (2) by the
regular recurrence of syllables distinguished in
pitch, in which case the rhythm may be called
melodic; (3) by the regular recurrence of syllables
distinguished in stress, in which case the rhythm
may be called accentual. The practice of lan-
guages may vary among these three forms ; but
in all languages, where rhythm exists at all, the
fundamental law of rhythm must be observed,
there must be a periodic measurement of time.
The tedious battle of the books is due to the fact
that certain scholars, blinded by their classical
predilections, emphasise the fundamental similar-
ity of rhythm in all languages (in the classics and
English, specifically), but fail to recognise the ac-
cidental varieties; whereas certain other scholars,
influenced like Mr. Liddell by their Teutonic
studies, consider the accidental variation alone
and are ill disposed to acknowledge any funda-
mental similarity. As a matter of fact, to make
ENGLISH VERSE 113
such a logomachy more inane, the rhythmic divi-
sion of time in both Greek and English was prob-
ably marked by the same combination of the first
and third manners was at once, that is, quanti-
tative and accentual. Only there is this distinc-
tion (which explains if it does not justify the
dispute), that in Greek quantitative rhythm was
strongly predominant, so much so that some
scholars deny the presence of accentual rhythm at
all, whereas in English accentual rhythm is pre-
dominant. Thus iambic rhythm in Greek is a
series of equal measures of time, each measure
containing a short syllable followed by a much
longer syllable; but it is also practically certain
that the long syllables were, as a rule, further
marked by a slight stress accent. In English this
iambic rhythm is a series of equal measures of
time, each containing an unaccented syllable fol-
lowed by a strongly accented syllable; but it is
further true that the accented syllable tends, al-
though not inevitably, to become slightly longer
than the unaccented syllable. It is therefore
proper to call Greek rhythm quantitative and
English rhythm accentual. It is, however, an
absurdity to say that the length of syllables has
nothing to do with English rhythm. The order
of quantities within the feet may sometimes vary,
but the quantity of the combined syllables within
each foot must be such as to divide the verse into
measures of equal time, exactly as music is divided
into bars.
114 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Quantity is indeed the root of the whole debate,
and it may be well to insist on the question a little
more. The discussion has arisen from a misunder-
standing of quantity in both the classics and
English. The quantity of a Greek syllable is de-
termined by fixed laws of pronunciation and is
always the same, and, further, a long syllable is
reckoned as occupying twice the time of a short;
hence quantitative rhythm in Greek assumes the
simplicity of an arithmetical ratio. In English,
on the other hand, neither of these laws holds
good; hence the non sequitur, because English
quantity does not follow the laws of Greek quan-
tity therefore there is no quantity at all in Eng-
lish. But, unless one is willing to assert that
such a syllable as bursts is not longer in pro-
nunciation than at, it is folly to deny the existence
of quantity in English. Only it remains true that
quantity in English, while fixed by the laws of
enunciation in some syllables, varies in other syl-
lables according to their emphasis in the sentence.
And, further, the scheme by which a long syllable
in Greek is reckoned as double a short syllable is
and was so recognised by the most authorita-
tive of Greek metricians a mere fiction of the
grammarians to simplify the schematisation of
rhythms. If Mr. Liddell, and others who accept
literally this ideal schematisation, should reflect a
moment (not to mention the profit of reading the
authorities on the subject), they would see that no
language is or ever was pronounced with such
ENGLISH VERSE
wooden regularity. It is only true to say that
the difference in Greek between long and short
syllables, though varying, was very decided, and
approximated roughly the ratio of 2 to i. In
Knglish the difference in quantity is ordinarily
much less than in Greek, but to assert that
quantity has no function in Knglish rhythm be-
cause Knglish quantities do not have the Greek
ratio of 2 to i, is to fall into a double and really
unpardonable error.
A concrete comparison will throw light on the
confusion. The first verse of the Odyssey reads
and is scanned as follows:
nos
Andra mo
i
erm<
2 pe
j
mousa po-
lytropon
mala
1
Dolla
The first verse of Evangeline is scanned:
This is the
/
forest pri-
/
meval the
/
murmuring
/
pines
s
and the
^^ > '
hemlocks
/
Now it will be observed that these two hexa-
meters are essentially the same. They both con-
sist of six equal measures of time, each measure
normally containing one long accented syllable
Il6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
followed either by two short unaccented syllables
or by one long unaccented syllable. But in their
secondary characteristics the two verses differ
considerably. In the Greek verse the initial long
syllables are much longer than the short syllables,
are in fact approximately equal to the time of the
two short syllables taken together. They are
thus sufficiently distinct to mark off the measures
by their quantitative value. But these initial
syllables have also a slight stress accent, which is
the pure result of the inherent rhythmising in-
stinct of the human mind. This rhythmical stress
is made possible by the fact that Greek words in
normal prose enunciation possess no regular stress
accent at all such as English words possess. In
the English verse, on the contrary, the initial
syllables all have a normal stress due to the
regular verbal or sentence accent, and this stress
is reenforced by the rhythmising instinct. Hence
the accent alone is sufficient to mark off the meas-
ures, and it is possible for the arrangement of the
quantities within a measure to vary considerably,
provided only that the sum of the quantities re-
mains fixed. In the foot "pines and the" the
first syllable is approximately the length of the
two following syllables together; in the foot "this
is the," however, the three syllables are about
the same; and between these two extremes every
shade of difference may exist. Only it will be
found a pretty constant rule that the first syllable
is slightly longer than the others if there are three
ENGLISH VERSE II?
in the foot, and a still more constant rule that the
measures of the verse consist in full of equivalent
periods of time. There is quantity in both Greek
and English, but it is quite proper to designate
the Greek verse as primarily quantitative, and the
English verse as primarily accentual.
I have as yet said nothing of the pitch accent,
for the reason that the subject is one of some ob-
scurity. It is, however, almost certain that the
regular accent of a Greek word was a pitch accent, -
as distinguished from the Knglish stress accent.
It did not fall necessarily on the same syllable
with the rhythmical stress accent, and produced
thus something of the effect of melody in the
recitation of Greek verse. In English this pitch
accent is a more complicated question. It plays
a little-recognised part in the function of rhythm,
but my own observation leads me to believe that
it is often used to mark off the time measurement,
when the stress accent, by some apparent irregu-
larity of construction, does not correspond to the
rhythmic divisions.
III. But all this has to do with the ideal or
model rhythm, and we have still to consider the
third law derived from Helmholtz's statement a
law so important that the neglect of it in Sidney
L,anier's treatise vitiates to a certain extent that
poet's brilliant theory. In the actual reading of
poetry two distinct, even contradictory, impulses
will be found at work the rhythmising instinct
and the normal unrhythmical enunciation of the
118 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
language. The result is a compromise shifting
toward one extreme or the other.
As for the rhythmising instinct in verse, that is
merely one clause of a law which runs through
every manifestation of energy, of a law so uni-
versal that it would appear as if the great heart of
nature beat with a regular systole and diastole,
sending impulses of rhythmic motion through
every artery of the world. So strong is this in-
stinct in us that a child in reading verse falls
unconsciously into a monotonous, undeviating
singsong which without hesitation sacrifices sense
and ordinary pronunciation. When a child re-
cites his Mother Goose, you may beat time to his
words as easily as you beat time to a dance tune.
The process of adapting the ordinary pronuncia-
tion of language to this rhythmic impulse is called
plasma, and was observed by the Greek metri-
cians long ago, as it may readily be observed by
us to-day. By plasma we lengthen a syllable
here and shorten a syllable there, so as to get the*
exact measure of time within a foot, and where
lengthening is not sufficient we insert a pause
corresponding precisely in its rhythmical effect to
the pauses in music. How exact the rhythm
may be made through plasma is exemplified in
the curious game of ' ' Pease porridge hot, " as I
was taught it, or " Bean porridge hot," as Pro-
fessor Goodell calls it, from a Yankee boyhood
presumably. I shall not attempt to explain
what every one must have learned as a child the
ENGLISH VERSE
manner in which the recitation of these words is
accompanied by a play of the hands which marks
off the rhythm with absolute regularity.
Pease porridge hot
Pease porridge cold
Pease porridge in the pot
Nine days old.
So the words run, and the rhythm falls into this
precise scheme, the macron representing twice the
time of a breve, and an inverted v representing a
pause equal in length to a breve:
The result, however, of giving this rhythmising
instinct full play is to render our reading in-
tolerably monotonous and to sacrifice the sense to
meaningless sound. The ordinary teacher in our
schools, seeing this deplorable effect, drills his
pupils to avoid this instinct and to read verse
"just as if it were prose." As a consequence,
most men, being neither natural nor educated,
but only half-educated, do indeed read verse as if
it were prose, succeeding so admirably that the
I2O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
rhythm is lost altogether. For it must be ob-
served that the normal pronunciation of language
does not produce any such regular rhythm as the
poet has before him in mind when he composes.
Verse differs from prose in this: that in verse the
words are so ordered that their normal pronuncia-
tion approximates closely enough to a rhythmical
scheme to permit the rhythmising instinct by
means of plasma to produce a distinguishable
rhythm without doing great violence to the sense.
Hence no arrangement of words is really rhyth-
mical to the half-educated ear which through
false training resists the rhythmising instinct.
Poetry as read by most people is hardly, if at all,
distinguishable from prose, unless it be for the re-
currence of rhymes; and it is correct, I believe, to
say that not a single actor on the English stage
to-day recites blank verse so as to distinguish it
clearly from prose. Edwin Booth was the last,
so far as I know, to preserve a nice obedience to
the rhythmising instinct, while never sacrificing
, the sense to it.
The proper reading of verse is thus a cunning
compromise between our rhythmising instinct and
the normal prose pronunciation of the words.
The compromise varies with every reader and
with each reader's differing moods; and for this
reason, if for no other, any attempt to adopt a pre-
cise schematisation for verse must fail of general
validity. The old system of macrons and breves
with the accent is probably the best, after all, so
ENGLISH VERSE 121
long as we remember that in Greek, and still
more in Bnglish, such a system represents only a
rough approximation of the reality. listen to a
good reader attentively, and for a while you will
be able to beat time to the rhythm of the verse as
accurately as to music; then suddenly, through
some stress of feeling or some desire to avoid
monotony, the rhythm will be loosened to an un-
measured flow of sounds, only to fall again into
the regular singsong. The final impression sug-
gests the rhythm of music, only much freer and
more capricious than a musician could properly
give to his performance. If we may trust a large
number of anecdotes, the great poets, in reading
their own verse, pronounced it with a strong sing-
song effect, showing that they had in their minds
an ideal rhythm of perfect ratios, from which
every deviation seemed to them an irregularity.
It is probable, too, that the Greeks and Romans
chanted their verse with much more of musical
singsong than seems permissible to our more
sophisticated ears.
ARTHUR SYMONS: THE TWO
IT is a saying of Joubert, as subtle as it is true,
that the essence of art is to be found in the union
of V illusion et la sagesse, illusion and, to extend
the meaning of the French phrase somewhat, dis-
illusion; and for one who cares to penetrate into
the secret influences of poetry on the human heart,
no better guide can be suggested than this brief
sentence. But like all such generalisations it is
susceptible of a false application in practice as well
as a right one, a distinction which has been newly
and emphatically attested by the publication of
the collected poems of Mr. Arthur Symons. For
there is a true illusion without which poetry can-
not exist, without which it sinks to the level of
unimaginative prose or passes into the thin aridi-
ties of metaphysics. In its simplest form this
illusion may, perhaps, be seen in the pastoral
world of our Elizabethan poets, in the Lytidas and
Comus of Milton best of all; and the skill to lend
reality to these idyllic dreams might even seem
one of the surest tests of a poet's right to deal
with the high illusion of art. Lycidas springs
from this theme just as much as the youthful
122
ARTHUR SYMONS 123
Pastorals of Pope, but what a chasm there lies be-
tween them! As the poet's thoughts and aspira-
tions are lifted up beyond the thoughts of common
men, so he is able without violating artistic illu-
sion to carry his reader into ideal scenes never
beheld on this earth. The noble isolation of
Milton's soul schooled him to speak understand-
ingly the ideal language of Arcadia, and some-
thing within our souls responds to every word.
But in the mouth of a worldling like Pope this
language becomes a shallow affectation and con-
veys no illusion of reality to the reader.
And if you wish to see the power of poetic illu-
sion exemplified in a more general form than the
pretty deceptions of Arcadia, turn to any of the
greater plays of Shakespeare, to Hamlet, which
will make you believe for the space of a few hours
that human life really revolves about such mystic
musings and expresses itself in such rapt language
as the mad Dane's, or to The Tempest, in which
the poet has symbolised his own powers of en-
chantment in the wizard Prospero. And yet, side
by side with this illusion, there must always in
the greater poets run a note of disillusion, a note
subdued for the most part so as scarcely to be
heard, but rising to the surface now and again
with a strange quivering of mingled sadness and
joy, of sadness for the fair enchantment it dispels,
of joy for the glimpse it affords into something
divine and very high. You may hear this note of
disillusion many times in Shakespeare, clearest of
124 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
all in The Tempest, where with a word Prospero
puts an end to his fairy drama in the woods, and
all the insubstantial pageant fades away.
For one acquainted with Oriental literature it is
impossible to reflect on this illusion of art without
recurring to the Hindu doctrine of Mayd, who is
supposed to be the creative force of all this wonder-
ful web of appearances that enwrap the spirit in
their mesh and charm the spirit's attention by
their mystery of beauty and seeming benevolence.
To the Oriental, as often to the man of the West
who considers the character of this illusion, Mdy&
assumes the form of the eternal-feminine unfolding
her allurements before the masculine looker-on.
So in the book of one of the two great philosophies
of India the story of illusion and disillusion is told
in this metaphor of the stage:
Like as a dancing-girl to sound of lyres
Delights the king and wakens sweet desires
For one brief hour, and having shown her art
With lingering bow behind the scene retires:
So o'er the Soul alluring Nature vaunts
Her lyric spell, and all her beauty flaunts;
And she, too, in her time withdrawing leaves
The Watcher to his peace 't is all she wants.
Now have I seen it all! the Watcher saith,
And wonders that the pageant lingereth:
And, He hath seen me! then the Other cries,
And wends her way: and this they call the Death.
And when the play is seen, the illusion dispelled,
and the dancing has disappeared, for a while the
ARTHUR SYMONS 12$
watcher waits in quiet, seeming to live the old life,
as a potter's wheel revolves a little space after the
potter's hand is still; but in reality the desire of
this world is ended and in his time he withdraws
into the untroubled peace of his nature. It is
called Death; it is also called the Awakening. It
is a consummation of philosophy not unmixed
with joy, though it may seem empty to most
Western minds. It is even in another way the
consummation of poetry, for ever and anon, as we
have seen, the true poet lifts for a moment the
very veil of illusion he is weaving and shows us
glimpses of what is beyond. And that is well.
But suppose, when the play is ended, there is no
wisdom of self-knowledge attained, no spiritual
joy to take the place of the old lust of the eyes,
no royal watcher sitting serenely apart, but only
some poor outcast of the street, a brother in
life to the painted dancer on the stage what
then?
Now the story of such an illusion and such an
awakening is the theme of the poems which Mr.
Arthur Symons has recently collected and pub-
lished in two volumes. In one group of these
poems the parallel to the Oriental conception of
the dancing-girl is so marked that the author
would almost seem to have had the impressing
of this moral in his mind when he wrote them.
I refer to The Dance of the Seven Sins, The Lover
of the Queen of Sheba, and The Dance of the
Daughters of Herodias, in each of which the poet
126 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
imagines the allurements of the world as dancing
before the eyes of some tempted watcher.
Is it the petals falling from the rose ?
For in the silence I can hear a sound
Nearer than my own heart-beat, such a word
As roses murmur, blown by a great wind.
I see a pale and windy multitude
Beaten about the air, as if the smoke
Of incense kindled into visible life
Shadowy and invisible presences;
And, in the cloudy darkness, I can see
The thin white feet of many women dancing,
And in their hands . . .
That is the illusion of the world and of the de-
sires of the world, daughters of Herodias dancing
before the grey face of Herod. And as they dance
they sing
"For are not we," they say, " the end of all?
Why should you look beyond us ? If you look
Into the night, you will find nothing there:
We also have gazed often at the stars.
We, we alone among all beautiful things,
We only are real: for the rest are dreams."
But the watcher grows weary of the long mono-
tony of the scene:
Have I not seen you as you are
Always, and have I once admired
Your beauty ? I am very tired,
Dancers, I am more tired than you.
When shall the dance be all danced through ?
ARTHUR SYMONS
It is the beginning of wisdom, you say, the cry of
the Hindu watcher, " L,o, I have seen it all!"
and yet
Wisdom is weariness to me.
For wisdom, being attained, but shows
That all things are but shadows cast
On running water, swiftly past,
And as the shadow of the rose
That withers in the mirror glassed.
And that is the outcome ' * Wisdom is weari-
ness!"
O bondslave, bondslave unto death,
Might I but hope that death should free
This self from its eternity!
It was, you see, a false illusion that could lead
only to a false awakening; it is utterly different
from the true illusion such as hovers over the
pastoral world of Lycidas and works through the
magic of Prospero, and the awakening from it is
equally different from the disillusion of Shake-
speare or of the Hindu philosopher. The true
illusion does not confuse the things of the spirit
with the things of the world. It knows that for
a while the way of the spirit must lie through
this arr]$ \eiiia)va, this meadow-land of calamity,
and its office is by a deliberate effort of the will to
throw the glamour of light and joy and freedom
on the objects by the roadside, so that the spirit
may journey swiftly and pleasantly to its own
128 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
upland home. And when its task is completed it
leaves the spirit at rest with itself, without regret
or further craving, filled with the consummation
of peace that springs from experience and self-
knowledge, while the world of the senses remains
in memory only so far as this world shadows the
spirit's own high desires. But the false illusion
is an inner blindness and confusion; it is false be-
cause there enters into it no faith in the joy of
things unseen, no knowledge even that such
things exist; it is false because for the voice of the
spirit it hears only the clamorous outcry of a man's
lower personality springing from the desires of
the body and the perceptions of the body, and
is in the end one with what is desired and per-
ceived. At the first this false illusion is sweet,
but soon it is troubled with the bitterness of
satiety; and the awakening from it leaves only
the emptiness of endless regret and self-torment-
ing. The false disillusion is a discovery that the
looker-on who masqueraded as the spirit is merely
a phantom of the body; it is a perception of the
hollowness of the old illusion without the power
of escaping therefrom. The watcher of the Ori-
ental philosophers is one perfectly distinct from
this "self" that cries out to death for deliver-
ance from its own eternity. The disillusion of
the flesh is perhaps the saddest chapter in human
experience.
Now the composition of Mr. Symons's two
volumes is such that we are able to trace the pro-
ARTHUR SYMONS I2Q
gress of his poetic mood from the first illusion to
its consummation in a false disillusion; and this
regular gradation we can follow with a precision
which is at least a striking proof of the author's
sincerity. As stated in the prefatory note, these
volumes are made up of selections from five pre-
viously published works, viz.: Days and Nights,
in 1889; Silhouettes, in 1892; London Nights, in
1895; Amoris Victima, in 1897; and Images of
Good and Evil, in 1899; to which is added a
sheaf of new poems, The Loom of Dreams. In
one respect the substance of these successive books
is the same; from beginning to end we are in a
land of dreams dreams always, whether fair or
gloomy, or the haunting remembrance of dreams.
The introductory poem of the first book is a
sonnet that describes the delicious sense of drown-
ing in the gulf of opium, and in like manner the
last poem of all closes with these words in the
mouth of Faustus:
When Helen lived, men loved, and Helen was:
I have seen Helen, Helen was a dream,
I dreamed of something not in Helen's eyes.
What shall the end of all things be ? I wait
Cruel old age, and kinder death, and sleep.
But if the substance of all these poems is woven
on the same loom of dreams, there is still, as I
have said, a profound change in their colour and
texture as we proceed. Passing over the first
book, from which only a few disconnected poems
I3O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
have been chosen, and these evidently written be-
fore the author had arrived at maturity of self-
consciousness, we come to the collection entitled
Silhouettes, which will probably appeal to the
largest circle of readers although they can hardly
be called the strongest specimens of Mr. Symons's
work. Yet even these poems can never attain to
any wide popularity, nor can they ever have much
weight with practical intelligences that shun the
evanescent world of revery where the real and the
unreal meet and blend together in indistinguish-
able twilight. For this atmosphere is one of in-
dulgent brooding; their warp and woof are of the
stuff of dreams woven by a mind that turns from
the actual issues of life as a naked body cowers
from the wind. The world is seen through a
haze of abstraction, glimmeringly, as a landscape
looms misty and vague through the falling, flut-
tering veil of the rain. Indeed it is noteworthy,
how many of the poems descriptive of nature or
of the lyondon streets are drenched with rains and
blown by gusty winds:
The wind is rising on the sea,
The windy white foam-dancers leap;
And the sea moans uneasily,
And turns to sleep and cannot sleep.
Ridge after rocky ridge uplifts
Wild hands, and hammers at the land,
Scatters in liquid dust, and drifts
To death among the dusty sand.
ARTHUR SYMONS 1$!
On the horizon's nearing line,
Where the sky rests, a visible wall,
Grey in the offing, I divine
The sails that fly before the squall.
And human nature is viewed through a like
mist, a mist of tears over laughter, as it may look
to one who dreams deliberately while the heart is
young and the haunting terror of the awakening
seems still something that can be held aloof at his
own sweet will. L,ove is the constant theme, not
the great passion of strong men that smites and
burns through the world, but the lighter play of
emotions that dally and wanton over their own
flowering beauty. And these women, to whom
the poet's love goes out, girls of the dancing hall
and the street, still young and very fair, are only
a Western reading of that symbol of nature that
dances before the watching soul of the Orient.
Their faces steal into the heart with the witchery
and insubstantiality of music:
Across the tides of music, in the night,
Her magical face,
A light upon it as the happy light
Of dreams in some delicious place
Under the moonlight in the night.
They are not moral and they are not immoral, for
they bear no relation to the claims of the soul;
they are the figures of a fleeting illusion, a mere
blossoming of the flesh yet undefiled:
132 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
White girl, your flesh is lilies
Under a frozen moon,
So still is
The rapture of your swoon
Of whiteness, snow or lilies.
Virginal in revealment,
Your bosom's wavering slope,
Concealment,
In fainting heliotrope,
Of whitest white's revealment,
Is like a bed of lilies,
A jealous-guarded row,
Whose will is
Simply chaste dreams: but oh,
The alluring scent of lilies!
So new is the illusion as yet, so fresh this vision
of dreams under the spell of white loveliness, that
it passes unscathed through the fires of lust:
There with the women, haggard, painted, and old,
One fresh bud in a garland withered and stale,
She, with her innocent voice and her clear eyes, told
Tale after shameless tale.
And ever the witching smile, to her face beguiled,
Paused and broadened, and broke in a ripple of fun,
And the soul of a child looked out of the eyes of a child,
Or ever the tale was done.
The illusion is fair and wonderful; it revels in
sweet fragrances and the unforgettable odours of
shaken hair; even the artificiality of this desired
beauty, its falsities of rouge and pearl-powder,
seem but a touch of added spice to make its
ARTHUR SYMONS 133
allurement more pungent. What though he who
observes and translates this beauty into rhymes
knows that it is only illusion ? and what though
he who reads and for a while surrenders himself to
its sweet intoxication knows it is only illusion ?
Because the watcher in his real heart penetrates
this illusion and knows that it must so soon slip
back into the hideous reality, into the painted and
haggard ugliness of the flesh that is only flesh and
grows old, therefore he feels a greater tenderness
for this " frail duration of a flower," and a wist-
fulness deeper than comes to one who has some-
thing of his own spiritual hope to throw over the
vanishing loveliness. He is touched by the fore-
boding of " the little plaintive smile "
And those pathetic eyes of hers;
But all the London footlights know
The little plaintive smile that stirs
The shadow in those eyes of hers.
And joined with this tenderness for what must
pass away, there is an undercurrent of regret for
his own joys that endure so little a space; there is
even now, while dreams are the only reality to
him, a troublous suspicion rising at intervals that
the substance is slipping from his grasp, and this
suspicion deepens his regret for the actual past
into regret for the evanescent present shadow of
things,
We are two ghosts that had their chance to live,
And lost it, she and I.
134 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
The poignancy of this tenderness and regret is
something a little different from the sigh that runs
through so much poetry for passing things; it is
the result of a foreboding, half welcome, half
dreaded, that the illusion of this beauty is a
treachery, a snare set by some unseen tempter to
hold a man from his true happiness. More than
once Mr. Symons compares this illusion to the
smile of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, whose haunted
meaning no man, unless it be perhaps Walter
Pater, has ever interpreted :
Your smile is like a treachery,
A treachery adorable;
So smiles the siren where the sea
Sings to the unforgetting shell.
Close lips that keep the secret in,
Half spoken by the stealthy eyes,
Is there indeed no word to win,
No secret, from the vague replies
Of lips and lids that feign to hide
That which they feign to render up ?
Is there, in Tantalus' dim cup,
The shadow of water, nought beside ?
The shadow of water, indeed, and nothing
more. There lies the pity of it all. Suppose the
thirsty watcher of the play suddenly becomes
aware that the pageant is insubstantial shadows,
and that the cup of this world's delight which he
longs to raise to his lips is empty and holds only
ARTHUR SYMONS 135
the shadow of water what then ? And suppose
that the watcher has no desire in his heart save
this one desire of the world's delight what then ?
That is the terrible disillusion of the flesh, a cruel
mockery of the true awakening; and for the man
on whom it falls as it must some day fall on
every man of insight, either the false disillusion or
the true awakening there is nothing left but the
endless rage of endeavour to hold fast an illusion
which no longer deceives, or the sullen apathy
of despair, or the unthinking submission to his
ever coarsening appetites. You will hear the first
note of this coming disillusion in the inevitable
cry of satiety :
For us the roses are scarce sweet,
And scarcely swift the flying feet
Where masque to masque the moments call;
All has been ours that we desired,
And now we are a little tired
Of the eternal carnival.
With this word of weariness we pass from the
book of Silhouettes to the London Nights, pub-
lished only three years later, and the change is as
marked as it is significant. On the light illusion,
the shimmering web of dreams that spun them-
selves almost of their own accord, begins to fall the
lengthening shadows of the actual world. The
transient note of satiety becomes more persistent,
and an ever greater effort of the will is required
lest the fluttering curtain of illusion be blown
136 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
away and so discover the naked reality which
the watcher dreads to behold. The watcher be-
gins to grow conscious that he is himself a part
of that nature, weary a little and saddened by the
satiety which must continue for how long ? its
dance of forced gayety.
My life is like a music-hall,
Where, in the impotence of rage,
Chained by enchantment to my stall)
I see myself upon the stage
Dance to amuse a music-hall.
My very self that turns and trips,
Painted, pathetically gay,
An empty song upon the lips
In make-believe of holiday:
I, I, this thing that turns and trips!
What we have to observe now is this ' ' im-
potence of rage ' ' spending itself in the effort to
preserve the fading illusion, or at least to save
some part of that illusion's pleasure. To accom-
plish this all the colours must be heightened and
all the emotions sharpened, though by doing so
the very daintiness and subtlety of impressions
which formed the fascination of the illusion are
stript away and the deprecated end is hastened.
Ah! no oblivion, for I feel
Your lips deliriously steal
Along my neck, and fasten there;
I feel the perfume of your hair,
ARTHUR SYMONS 1 37
I feel your breast that heaves and dips
Desiring my desirous lips,
And that ineffable delight
When souls turn bodies . . .
Yet even here we are far from the simple pas-
sion of the flesh, the passion, for example, of
Catullus for his Lesbia, in which there is no talk
of souls that turn into bodies but only the natural
cry of a man of strong animal appetites and strong
unperverted intellect. The morbidness and de-
cadence of Mr. Symons's verse are shown, indeed,
in this very hankering after food which to suit
a jaded appetite must be unwholesomely spiced
with appeals to what is called the soul. He
shrinks instinctively from the outright passion
of a Catullus, and chooses instead what ?
" Love is a raging fire,
Choose thou content instead;
Thou, the child of the dust,
Choose thou a delicate Lust."
"Thou hast chosen," I said
To the angel of pale desire.
In this same way he cannot pause to find com-
fort in the homely associations of a love that is
less a passion than a quiet haven from the vexa-
tions of life. You will find in these volumes
nothing corresponding, for example, to the gentle
verses of Tibullus counting up the treasures of his
love and pastoral content while the morning rain
washes on the roof. On the contrary you will
138 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
find an artificial passion which requires every
conceivable stimulus to preserve it from passing
into sheer disgust:
Pallid out of the darkness, adorably white,
Pale as the spirit of rain, with the night in her hair,
Rene"e undulates, shadow-like, under the light,
Into the outer air.
Mournful, beautiful, calm with that vague unrest,
Sad with sensitive, vaguely ironical mouth;
Byes a-flame with the loveliest, deadliest
Fire of passionate youth;
Mournful, beautiful, sister of night and rain,
Elemental, fashioned of tears and fire,
Ever desiring, ever desired in vain,
Mother of vain desire.
The morbid unrest that troubles this pallid hot-
house flower is the attraction most of all sought
by the watcher anything to break the monotony
of the awakening which to him is death. Kven
the sense of shame is welcomed if only it will lend
a little poignancy to this desire that grows chill,
if only it will for a moment continue the illusion
that something in the watcher stands apart from
the play and is above it:
I too have sought on many a breast
The ecstasy of an unrest,
I too have had my dreams, and met
(Ah me !) how many a Juliet.
ARTHUR SYMONS 139
lost and wrecked, how long ago,
Out of the drowning past, I know
You come to call me, come to claim
My share of your delicious shame.
And shame at least is ready at hand. Out of
this ecstasy of unrest, this morbid curiosity, this
terror of satiety, there does spring at last a love
that is genuine in its way, a pale amorphous pas-
sion, for one whom he calls Bianca. It is a love
the telling of which haunts the imagination (so,
indeed, it was meant to do) as something not of
this world or the other, a thing unclean not with
the taint of the untroubled body, but of the body
that tortures itself maddeningly to escape from its
own insufficiency and masquerade as the soul.
So the simplicity of flesh
Held me a moment in its mesh,
Till that too palled, and I began
To find that man is mostly man
In that, his will being sated, he
Wills ever new variety.
And then I found you, Bianca! Then
1 found in you, I found again
That chance or will or fate had brought
The curiosity I sought.
Ambiguous child, whose life retires
Into the pulse of those desires
Of whose endured possession speaks
The passionate pallor of your cheeks;
Child, in whom neither good nor ill
Can sway your sick and swaying will,
Only the aching sense of sex
140 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Wholly controls, and does perplex,
With dubious drifts scarce understood,
The shaken currents of your blood;
It is your ambiguity
That speaks to me and conquers me.
And the conclusion of the tale is this "So Bianca
satisfies my soul! " It is better to draw the veil
of silence over this scene of painfully-won illusion.
There are things it were good for a man, even for
a decadent poet, not to have written, and these
poems to Bianca, with their tortuous effort to
find the soul in the ambiguities and unclean
curiosities of a swaying will are of them. They
are a waste of shame.
The outcome of such an ' * ecstasy of unrest ' ' is
not difficult to foresee, and is the theme of the two
following books of the collection, Amoris Victima
and Images of Good and Evil. When the illusion
is dispelled, when the ambiguity is found to be
merely a deception of the flesh and the curiosity
has spent itself in a vain endeavour to discern
what does not exist, what can remain but the
desolation of emptiness ?
Was not our love fatal to you and me ?
The rapture of a tragic ecstasy
Between disaster and disaster, given
A moment's space, to be a hell in heaven ?
Hearken, I hear a voice, a voice that calls;
What shall remain for him ? sadly it cries:
Desolate years, eternal memories.
ARTHUR SYMONS 141
And so the first poems in this book which he calls
Amoris Victima are filled with regrets that at
least come nearer than any others in the collection
to showing the agony of a genuine passion broken
and defeated by some infirmity of the lover's will:
I am weary of living, and I long to be at rest
From the sorrowful and immense fatigue of love;
I have lived and loved with a seeking, passionate zest,
And weariness and defeat are the end thereof.
I have lived in vain, I have loved in vain, I have lost
In the game of Fate, and silently I retire;
I watch the moon rise over the sea, a ghost
Of burning noontides, pallid with spent desire.
But this sigh of passionate regret for what
seems the loss of a real happiness is but a tran-
sient note of honest self-deception. What follows
is the bitter cry of the long struggle, resumed
half-heartedly, between illusion and disillusion.
I do not wish to dwell at length on this struggle,
for it is not entirely pleasant reading, however
great its psychological interest may be. Through
it all runs the memory of the past, but a memory
of shame and not of simple regret:
rapture of lost days, all that remains
Is but this fever aching in my veins.
1 do not know you under this disguise:
I am degraded by my memories.
The thoughts that follow such memories are to
the poet like hideous Harpyes, beaked and taloned,
142 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
that gather about him in the darkness of his soul.
And the desires that torture him are the cruel
voice of the flesh from which all illusion has been
torn away, save the persistent denial of relief that
makes of their disillusion a mere mockery of the
true awakening:
Ah! in those shell-curved, purple eyelids bent
Towards some most dolorous accomplishment,
And in the painful patience of the mouth,
(A sundered fruit that waits, in a great drouth,
One draught of living water from the skies)
And in the carnal mystery of the eyes,
And in the burning pallor of the cheeks;
Voice of the Flesh! this is the voice that speaks
In agony of spirit, or in grief
Because desire dare not desire relief.
In the ocean of these degrading memories,
haunting thoughts, and impuissant desires, the
poor soul (let us call it soul) of the poet is tossed
alternately from the exaltation of terror to the
depths of indifferent despair. He learns at last
that * * to have fallen through dreams is to have
touched hell! " As with King Richard dreaming
on Bosworth Field, shadowy images rising from
what has been and clamorous of what is to be,
torment him with a power greater than any
reality of life. The body and substance of this
terror is a vision of emptiness, of the dark void,
that must swallow up the watcher when the
growing disillusion is made complete:
ARTHUR SYMONS 143
And something, in the old and little voice,
Calls from so farther off than far away,
I tremble, hearing it, lest it draw me forth,
This flickering self, desiring to be gone,
Into the boundless and abrupt abyss
Whereat begins infinity; and there
This flickering self wander eternally
Among the soulless, uncreated winds
Which storm against the barriers of the world.
It is not strange that this outcast self should make
the whole world of God to be a shadow of its own
mood, and tha\ this mood should assume the like-
ness of insomnia :
Who said the world is but a mood
In the eternal thought of God ?
I know it, real though it seem,
The phantom of a haschisch dream
In that insomnia which is God.
There, I think, is the last word to distinguish this
false awakening from the true. From such an
agony of insomnia there can be but one relief, the
repose of utter oblivion and the escape from self in
perfect death. Such in the end and nothing else
is the pleading cry of the disillusioned watcher.
But again this paroxysm of rebellion spends
itself in a little time, and in its place comes the
sigh of lonely indifference and impotence. And I
btiow not which of these alternating moods should
remain as the last impression of this tragic his-
tory. ' * There are grey hours when I drink of
144 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
indifference," he says; and " all things fade Into
the grey of a twilight that covers my soul with its
sky. ' ' And again : ' * The loneliness of the sea
is in my heart, And the wind is not more lonely
than this grey mind." All the wonted rapture
of the world fades into the grey of this impotent
listlessness:
The clamours of spring are the same old delicate noises,
The earth renews its magical youth at a breath,
And the whole world whispers a well-known, secret thing;
And I hear, but the meaning has faded out of the voices;
Something has died in my heart: is it death or sleep?
I know not, but I have forgotten the meaning of spring.
Always while reading these poems, which are
the first full and sincere expression of decadence
in English, with their light and fair illusion pass-
ing gradually into the terror of disillusion, I have
heard running through my memory three lines of
old John Ford which contain the very essence of
the right illusion of art (for art, as we have seen,
has its true and necessary illusion of joy as well as
this false illusion of sadness); and involuntarily
these lines would sound out as an echo or counter-
tone to the painfulness of Mr. Symons's lament.
They are like a breath of fresh air let into a murky
chamber:
Since my coming home I 've found
More sweets in one unprofitable dream
Than in my life's whole pilgrimage.
There would be a world of significance in com-
ARTHUR SYMONS 14$
paring this " coming home " with the wandering
of that " flickering self" in the void places of
despair.
And yet I would not leave the word despair as
the last comment on these poems, which, no mat-
ter what their sadness and morbidness may be,
stand quite apart from the ordinary versifying
of the day. They have, whatever may be said, a
great psychological interest for one who is curious
to study the currents of modern thought. Mr.
Symons impresses us as being absolutely sincere,
as being the only genuine and adequate repre-
sentative in Knglish of that widespread condition
which we call decadence. And sincerity in verse
is a quality of inestimable value. But more than
that: these poems are now and again so instinct
with original perception of beauty and so lilted
with cadences of sweetness, as to be remarkable
in themselves apart from their psychological in-
terest. Toward the end of the second volume,
and in the little book of recent poems that close
the collection, there forces its way at times,
through the turbulent cries of dull desires and
stinging regrets, a recurrent note of the first
simple delight in nature, a note which one
would gladly accept as prophetic of a new life to
arise out of the tragedy of despair. The repose
for which the poet sighs in this last poem I
would quote, is at least a better and more whole-
some thing than the impious oblivion of his earlier
craving:
146 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
REST
The peace of a wandering sky,
Silence, only the cry
Of the crickets, suddenly still,
A bee en the window-sill,
A bird's wing, rushing and soft,
Three flails that tramp in the loft,
Summer murmuring
Some sweet, slumberous thing,
Half asleep; but thou, cease,
Heart, to hunger for peace,
Or, if thou must find rest,
Cease to beat in my breast.
THE EPIC OF IRELAND
IN his preface to Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of
Muirthemne, 1 Mr. Yeats, her good friend, calls it
" the best book that has ever come out of Ireland;
for," as he says, " the stories it tells are a chief
part of Ireland's gift to the imagination of the
world." Mr. Yeats is one of the known prophets
of the Gaelic revival, and his eulogy may be sus-
pected of the customary national exaggeration;
yet to one who comes to Lady Gregory's work
from the outside as a lover of beautiful words
wherever he may find them, and who brings with
him only sufficient sympathy with things Irish to
understand their spirit, he trusts, without suffer-
1 It is an unfortunate drawback to the enjoyment of
old Irish literature that the spelling of the proper names
gives but the slightest inkling of their pronunciation.
The pronunciation commonly adopted is a middle form
between the oldest variety, no doubt indicated by the
ancient spelling, and the modern variety which, for many
of the names, is wanting altogether. Thus the name of
the king is spelled Conchubar and was probably pro-
nounced, originally, something like K6n-chovar. JThe
middle form employed in reading the romances is K5n-a-
chur, while the modern form is Conor. I give a table
of the pronunciation of the names occurring in this arti-
147
148 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
ing a perversion of judgment, this praise will
sound, not too enthusiastic, but too narrow. He
would prefer to hear simply that the Cuchulain is
one of the great books of the world, a greater
book than many are likely to comprehend until
its themes have been caught up and adopted into
the body of English literature. I know well
enough that the public of the present day is prone
to accept the ephemeral clever books and to ignore
the true books, and yet I have been surprised to
see how little the press in America has had to say
of these stories, and how little, comparatively,
they have been read, I say " in America," for I
believe that in England they have excited rather
more comment. Even if the prosaic Saxon is ab-
sorbed in reading the latest novel and the latest
treatise on economics, one might suppose that
every educated wanderer from Erin would be
quick to welcome these superb legends of his old
cle, premising that the vowels have the Italian sound: a
as in father, e as in great, i as in machine, o as in note
or not, u as in rule or full; ch is almost like k.
Cuchulain of Muirthemne (Ku-chif-lin of Mur-hv-na)
Tain Bo Cuailgne (taun bo chuln-ya)
Ailell (al-yel) Deirdre (der-dra)
Bmer (em-ir) Levarcham (la^-var-cham)
Conchubar (Kon-a-chur) Maeve (mev)
Gae Bulg (ge'bulg) Scathach (ska-ha)
Cathbad (k/f-fa) Usnach (us-na)
Naoise (m-sha) Cruachan (kru-a-chan)
Ferdiad (fer-df-a) Sidhe (shi).
Findabair (finn-a-var)
THE EPIC OF IRELAND 149
home, but there is no sign that such is the case.
I fear it is even necessary to explain somewhat
explicitly who this forgotten Cuchulain was, "this
name to be put in songs," and what these epic
tales of Ireland are.
Though the language Lady Gregory employs
is the quaint vernacular English of modern Ire-
land, the substance of her book goes back to the
heroic days of the land, to the seventh and
eighth centuries of our era when Ireland, partly
on account of her isolation from the tumultuous
changes of the continent, blossomed out, just be-
fore the terrible coming of the Norsemen, into a
civilisation of rare and passionate beauty. This
island of the far western seas was in those years
the sacred repository of the learning saved from
the classic past, and boasted to be the teacher of
Europe. But besides this borrowed culture of
Rome, she possessed a native art of a most pe-
culiar sort. It was a trait of the Celtic people,
and perhaps to a special degree of that Gaelic
branch of the race which inhabited Ireland, to
honour the poet as the world has hardly elsewhere
seen him honoured. The bards and fillas (or
higher poets) formed regular schools with an
ollav (or chief poet) at their head. Their educa-
tion lasted from seven to twelve years or even
longer, and when complete included the know-
ledge of more than three hundred and fifty differ-
ent metres. As for poetical substance, the ollav
was supposed to have at his command more than
150 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
two hundred and fifty prime stories for recitation
and one hundred secondary ones. So numerous
were these bardic reciters that Keating, the his-
torian of the seventeenth century, reckoned their
number at one third of the men of the free clans,
and so formidable was their power that their satire
was said to blast its victim and raise blisters on
his face.
Out of this enormous activity two principal
cycles of song and romance shaped themselves in
the heroic age of Ireland, deriving their substance
in large part from the annals of the great families,
but including, also, confused memories of an
ancient mythology. One of these, the cycle of
Finn and Ossian and Oscar, was long ago vulgar-
ised by the travesties of James Macpherson; the
other, the Cuchulain saga of Ulster, though al-
most forgotten until recent years, is far the more
important, both for the sweetness and nobility of
the actual stories and for their capability of large
development. The pivot of the whole series, so
to speak, is the famous Tain Bo Cuailgne or Cattle
Raid of Coolney, which relates how Ailell and
Maeve, king and queen of Con naught, made a
great hosting and drove back with them a magic
brown bull of Ulster. That would seem to lend
itself to a border ballad rather than to the forma-
tion of a true epic; and, indeed, it must not be
supposed that this saga of Ireland possesses the
stately grandeur or the achieved harmony we
connect with the narratives of Greece; it is, at
THE EPIC OF IRELAND 1$!
the best, epic material awaiting the accomplisher.
Nevertheless, the deeds of Cuchulain, who, single-
handed, opposed the men of Connaught, and
above all engaged in tremendous battle with his
friend Ferdiad, rise clear out of the regions of
mere balladry and, in my opinion, far above the
sagas of Germany and Iceland. About this cen-
tral event are grouped a circle of tales more or less
closely connected, and dealing directly or in-
directly with the fortunes of Cuchulain and
Conchubar, who is related to Cuchulain as Aga-
memnon was to Achilles. The most beautiful of
these subsidiary tales, so beautiful that one may
not hesitate to rank it among the few great
stories of tradition, is the ever memorable Fate
of the Sons of Usnach, with its fateful heroine,
Deirdre, Deirdre, named of sorrow, " comely be-
yond comparison of all the women of the world."
The manuscripts in which these tales have been
preserved are numerous and date from the eleventh
century, when the so-called Book of the Dun Cow
was transcribed, down to comparatively recent
times. Many of the stories had already appeared
in excellent literal translations, but it remained
for I^ady Gregory to make of them an ordered
piece of literature. By selecting the tales most
closely related and arranging them in proper
sequence, she has produced what may be called
roughly the Epic of Ireland. To be sure, the
same task had already been done and well done
in a way by Miss Eleanor Hull, but Miss Hull's
152 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
work lacks that last creative touch needed to
transfuse the various materials into one homo-
geneous body. This, L,ady Gregory, by omit-
ting a little here and there, and by piecing
together from the manifold forms in which the
tales are handed down, has actually accomplished.
There have not been wanting critics, who com-
plain that in this process of moulding L,ady Gre-
gory has smoothed away the wild, romantic spirit
that gave the legends their piquancy and value. I
confess that, after a pretty careful comparison of
I^ady Gregory's versions with those given in
Miss Hull's volume and elsewhere, I entirely fail
to see the force of this criticism. Almost invari-
ably I cannot quite say always her omissions
take away what is puerile or unconvincingly gro-
tesque or extraneous. They can be called a loss,
it seems to me, only by the pedant or the Irish
enthusiast. Again, the additions which she has
imported from manuscripts not used by Miss Hull
or Mr. Whitley Stokes sometimes increase the in-
terest of a story amazingly. As an instance of
such an addition, I would cite this exquisite piece
of romance, which relates how Deirdre was first
brought to the notice of men. Cathbad, the
Druid, had come to the house just after the birth
of Deirdre and had taken the child in his arms
and foretold the evil that was to fall upon men
through her loveliness. And this is what he said :
" I<et Deirdre be her name; harm will come through
her,
THE EPIC OF IRELAND 153
" In your fate, O beautiful child, are wounds, and ill-
doings, and shedding of blood.
" You will have a little grave apart to yourself; you
will be a tale of wonder for ever, Deirdre."
So the young child is given to Lavarcham, her
foster-mother, to be brought up in a lonely place,
among the hills, where the eye of man shall never
light on her fatal dower of beauty. But here, as
always in the realm of story, the radiant gem
cannot be concealed:
Lavarcham, that had charge of her, used to be giving
Deirdre every knowledge and skill that she had herself.
There was not a blade of grass growing from root, or a
bird singing in the wood, or a star shining from heaven,
but Deirdre had the name of it. But there was one thing
she would not have her know, she would not let her have
friendship with any living person of the rest of the world
outside their own house.
But one dark night of winter, with black clouds over-
head, a hunter came walking the hills, and it so hap-
pened that he missed the track of the hunt, and lost his
way and his comrades.
And a heaviness came upon him, and he lay down on
the side of the green hillock by Deirdre's house. He
was weak with hunger and going, and perished with
cold, and a deep sleep came upon him. While he was
lying there a dream came to the hunter, and he thought
that he was near the warmth of a house of the Sidhe,
[or fairy folk who dwell in the hills,] and the Sidhe in-
side making music, and he called out in his dream, " If
there is any one inside, let them bring me in, in the
name of the Sun and the Moon." Deirdre heard the
voice, and she said to Lavarcham, "Mother, mother,
154 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
what is that?" But I/avarcham said, "It is nothing
that matters; it is the birds of the air gone astray, and
trying to find one another. But let them go back to the
branches of the wood." Another troubled dream came
on the hunter, and he cried out a second time. "What
is that ? " asked Deirdre again. " It is nothing that mat-
ters," said Lavarcham. " The birds of the air are look-
ing for one another; let them go past to the branches of
the wood." Then a third dream came to the hunter,
and he cried out a third time, if there was any one in
the hill to let him in for the sake of the Elements, for
he was perished with cold and overcome with hunger.
"Oh! what is that, Lavarcham ? " said Deirdre. "There
is nothing there for you to see, my child, but only the
birds of the air, and they lost to one another, but let
them go past us to the branches of the wood. There is
no place or shelter for them here to-night." "Oh,
mother," said Deirdre, "the bird asked to come in for
the sake of the Sun and the Moon, and it is what you
yourself told me, that anything that is asked like that,
it is right for us to give it. If you will not let in the
bird that is perished with cold and overcome with
hunger, I myself will let it in." So Deirdre rose up
and drew the bolt from the leaf of the door, and let in
the hunter.
This is not only exquisite in itself, purer,
sweeter romance will not easily be found though
many ancient books be searched, but it is neces-
sary to the thos of the events, as an Aristotelian
would say, and the omission of it in Miss Hull's
version leaves the story maimed of its fairest
member. It shows very well, moreover, the
quaint language Lady Gregory has chosen for her
translation, the spoken dialect of her beloved
THE EPIC OF IRELAND 155
Ireland, very simple and colloquial yet touched
with I know not what glamour of pathos and lyric
passion in accord with the old-world romance of
the legends. To follow Deirdre through the ad-
ventures of her tragic life; to tell how she is
wooed by Conchubar, the King of Ulster; how
she avoids the royal suitor and bestows her coveted
love upon Naoise, the son of Usnach; how she
flees with Naoise and his two brothers to Scot-
land; how they are lured back to Ireland; how
Deirdre on the way prophesies of the evils to
come; how the three sons of Usnach are treacher-
ously slain; and how Deirdre by the waves of the
sea gives up her young life that she may cheat the
cruel king of so much loveliness and that she may
not be parted from the three dear sons of Usnach,
all this would be to transgress the limits of an
essay; and is it not written out fairly in the book ?
I cannot read this story of Deirdre, with her dower
of fatal beauty and her wild, uncredited prophesy-
ings of woe, without recalling the two heroines of
Greece, Helen and Cassandra, whose characters
she seems to bear strangely blended together; and
I think if one does not set her lamentations among
the noblest lyric poems of the world, he may be
certain, as Mr. Yeats says, that the wine-press of
the poets has been trodden for him in vain.
But Deirdre is not the only notable heroine in
these tales. There is Emer of the yellow hair, of
the fair form, whom Cuchulain took to wife after
the long courting and after the high training in
156 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
heroism under Scathach, the mystic woman of
Scotland, there where he met Ferdiad his com-
panion in arms. Kmer, too, like Deirdre, knew
the toils of fate, and her jealousy of Fand, the
woman from beyond the waves of the great sea, is
one of the memorable passions of the book. And,
like Deirdre, she, too, in the end sang a marvel-
lous lamentation over the body of her fallen lord.
There is Maeve, the bloodthirsty queen of Con-
naught, who spurred on her people and knew no
rest till she got for herself the magic bull of
Cuailgne. And there is her daughter Findabair,
of the fair eyebrows, she whose love was pro-
mised by Maeve to the many champions who went
out to slay Cuchulain, and last of all to Ferdiad
to hearten him in the sad combat. But always
Findabair cherished in her breast the passion she
had felt for one dear, murdered suitor who was
dear also to the Sidhe; and when she heard how
her love had been promised to one champion after
another and had caused their death, then, as the
story relates, " her heart broke with the shame
and the pity and she fell dead, and they buried
her."
It must not be supposed, however, that these
heroines, attractive and human as they are, over-
shadow the warriors and princes and prophetic
Druids who move through these scenes of adven-
ture, or that the clamour and pathos of woman's
love drown out the sound of battle-cry and the
glory of mighty deeds. Still the epic valour of
THE EPIC OF IRELAND
men overrides all, the n\ia avdp&v, as it should
in great stories. Our interest here, as Words-
worth felt on hearing the song of the Gaelic lass,
is still
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.
I am tempted in this connection to quote a little
from the famous duel of Cuchulain and Ferdiad,
if only to balance the softer passages of Deirdre's
solitude. It is told in The Cattle Raid of Coolney.
The clans of Ailell and Maeve had marched into
Ulster, and, owing to a strange disease that held
the other men of Ulster in bondage, Cuchulain
alone was free to oppose the advancing host.
This he does so effectually that day after day a
selected champion of Connaught falls at his hands.
At last, with the lure of Findabair's love, Maeve
rouses Ferdiad, the old companion of Cuchulain
in Scotland, to go out against the dreaded hero.
Thereupon follows the battle of four days, with
its contest of alternating pity and wrath, and its
mingling of
All passions of a fight unmatched till then
On warfields of the immemorial world.
And this is how their fighting and resting on the
first day is told:
So they began with their casting weapons, and they
took their protecting shields, and their round-handled
spears, and their little quill spears, and their ivory-hilted
knives, and their ivory-hafted spears, eight of each of
158 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
them they had, and these were flying from them and to
them like bees on the wing on a fine summer day; there
was no cast that did not hit, and each one went on shoot-
ing at the other with those weapons from the twilight of
the early morning to the full midday, until all their
weapons were blunted against the faces and the bosses of
the shields. And as good as the throwing was, the de-
fence was so good that neither of them drew blood from
the other through that time.
"Let us leave these weapons now, Cuchulain," said
Ferdiad, " for it is not by the like of them our fight will
be settled." " Let us leave them, indeed, if the time be
come," said Cuchulain.
They stopped then, and threw their darts into the
hands of their chariot-drivers. "What weapons shall
we use now, Cuchulain?" said Ferdiad. "The choice
of weapons is yours till night," said Cuchulain. "Let
us, then," said Ferdiad, " take to our straight spears, with
the flaxen strings in them." "Let us now, indeed,"
said Cuchulain. And then they took two stout shields,
and they took to their spears.
Kach of them went on throwing at the other with the
spears from the middle of midday until the fall of the
evening. And good as the defence was, yet the throw-
ing was so good that each of them wounded the other in
that time.
" Let us leave this now," said Ferdiad. " Let us leave
it, indeed, if the time has come," said Cuchulain.
So they left off, and they threw their spears away from
them into the hands of their chariot-drivers. Each of
them came to the other then, and each put his hands
round the neck of the other, and gave him three kisses.
Their horses were in the one enclosure that night, and
their chariot-drivers at the one fire ; and their chariot-
drivers spread beds of green rushes for them, with
wounded men's pillows on them.
THE EPIC OF IRELAND I $9
So the battle continued for three days, but on
the fourth day, when the choice of weapons came
a second time to Cuchulain, he chose the Gae
Bulg, a mystical spear that no man could with-
stand, and on that day Ferdiad knew that he was
to die. The lament of the victor over his fallen
friend is one of the unforgettable lyrics of the
book. And ' ' this thing will hang over me for
ever, ' ' he cried in the end. * ' Yesterday he was
larger than a mountain; to-day there is nothing
of him but a shadow."
I am aware that passages of this kind, when
torn from their context, convey very feebly the
original impression of the scene. Indeed, the
excellence of these stories is not of the ballad sort
that can be transferred to a page, but has the epic
effect that comes from the accumulation or gradual
development of interest. It depends on plot, in
the Aristotelian sense of the word, on events,
that is, so disposed as to bring out heroic traits of
character and to lead up to some supreme emotion.
Now in so far as the Irish legends possess these
qualities they merely conform to the model of the
great story wherever and in whatever language it
may be found. But they do possess, also, certain
subsidiary qualities which quite distinguish them
from other literatures, and which lend them a pe-
culiar interest apart from plot and characterisation
and apart from the universal elements of humour
and pathos and passion and sublimity.
And here I cannot help regretting that this
l6o SHELBURNE ESSAYS
body of Gaelic romance, altogether the finest
product of the Celtic genius, was unknown to
Renan and to Matthew Arnold when they wrote
their respective essays. I can imagine how sub-
tilely they would have drawn out these subsidiary
qualities and set forth the distinctive spirit of the
Gael. Renan would not have dwelt so strongly
on isolation as the master trait of Celtic character:
Matthew Arnold would not, I think, have laid
quite the same emphasis on sentiment-, he would,
perhaps, have laid even greater stress on the
word magic, on the Celtic * ' gift of rendering with
wonderful felicity the magical charm of nature."
Magic is, indeed, as he reiterates in his way, just
the word for it, but he would have given to the
term a meaning fraught with far more of human
emotion and less of fairy enchantment. He drew
his inferences from the Mabinogion, tales of the
Cymri, another branch of the Celtic race, which
are to the Gaelic epos as a child's book is to a
man's. He would have found in the prose and
verse of the Irish Gael the same delicacy and
charm of magical description as in the Cymric
tales, but he would have caught, also, a deeper
note of magic power vibrant with passionate
possibilities.
There is an ancient poem which tradition
holds to have been uttered by Amergin, the
son of Milesius, when, at the coming of the
wanderers, he, first of the Gaels, set foot on Irish
soil:
THE EPIC OF IRELAND l6l
I am the wind which blows o'er the sea ;
I am the wave of the deep ;
- I am the bull of seven battles ;
I am the eagle on the rock ;
I am a tear of the sun ;
I am the fairest of plants ;
I am a boar for courage ;
I am a salmon in the water ;
I am a lake in the plain;
I am the word of knowledge.
This is not an expression of pantheism, as some
have interpreted it, but of that kinship with the
powers of nature, which never left the Gael and
which rises at times to a sense of magical identi-
fication. And always it is the medium of his
emotion. So when Cuchulain has fought the
lamentable battle with his son, who is unknown
to him at first and is discovered only in death,
he breaks out into a cry of anguish that is like an
echo of the song of the first Gael:
"I am the father that killed his own son, the fine
green branch; there is no hand or shelter to help me.
" / am a raven that has no home; I am a boat going
from wave to wave; I am a ship that has lost its rudder;
I am the apple left on the tree; it is little I thought of
falling from it; grief and sorrow will be with me from
this time."
Nearness to nature was the very birthright of
the Gael. No warrior of the land was without
this sympathy, not even the great Finn, type of
all warriors in later times. Dr. Sigerson has
l62 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
translated a haunting song in which Ossian, the
son of Finn, relates to St. Patrick his father's
love of bird and deer and sighing waters:
The tuneful tumult of that bird,
The belling deer on ferny steep;
This welcome in the dawn he heard,
These soothed at eve his sleep.
Dear to him the wind-loved heath,
The whirr of wings, the rustling brake;
Dear the murmuring glens beneath,
And sob of Droma's lake.
And as man is bound thus closely to Nature, so
she in turn often assumes a human likeness that
comes out in little touches of metaphor and per-
sonification. When, for example, one of the
Ulster men went out to explore, his way of return
lay across a river. " But he gave a false leap,"
the story says, "just where the water was deepest,
and a wave laughed over him^ and he died."
But these are lesser things. A more striking
outcome of this magical identification (which
passes far beyond the charm found by Matthew
Arnold in the Mabinogiori) is seen in what may
be called the prophetic or foreboding sympathy of
nature. By some mystic bond the waves of river
and lake, the wide-flowing winds, the clouds, and
the living creatures that grow upon the earth are
all prescient of the fate of the Gael and give signs
of what is to befall him, so that he walks among
them as through a world of riddling adumbra-
THE EPIC OF IRELAND 163
tions. Thus before the great battle, when the
sick men of Ulster arouse themselves to meet the
hosting of Connaught, Mac Roth, the herald, goes
out to learn tidings of them for Ailell and Maeve,
" and he had not long to wait before he heard a
noise that was like the falling of the sky, or the
breaking in of the sea over the land, or the falling
of trees on one another in a great storm." And
this is the report he brings back to the king and
queen : * ' I thought I saw a grey mist far away
across the plain, and then I saw something like
falling snow, and then through the mist I saw
something shining like sparks from a fire, or like
the stars on a very frosty night." It is not neces-
sary to remark how skilfully real appearances are
here mingled with metaphor and magic foreboding;
for the cloud was the dust that went up from the
marching men of Ulster, and the flakes of snow
were the foam flakes from their champing horses,
and the stars were their angry eyes gleaming
under their helmets. Other passages, more pro-
phetic and less clearly metaphorical than this,
might be quoted, but none, perhaps, more charac-
teristic of the Gaelic manner. Again, this mystic
adumbration takes the form of a dream, as when
the High King Conaire foresees his doom. And
it is what he said: " I had a dream in my sleep a
while ago, of the howling of my dog Oscar, of
wounded men, of a wind of terror, of keening that
overcame laughter." Or again, the warning
passes still further beyond the scope of ordinary
164 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
phenomena and becomes a waking vision of the
day that appears with symbolic form. In this
manner, before his death, Cuchulain goes forth
with Cathbad, the Druid, and, coming to a ford,
beholds "a young girl, thin and white-skinned
and having yellow hair, washing and ever wash-
ing, and wringing out clothing that was stained
crimson red, and she crying and keening all the
time."
Not unrelated to this kind of visionary symbol-
ism is another device of the Irish story-tellers
which forms one of the commonest features of
their art. It is a trick that Homer used to de-
scribe the army of Greece, and that Sir Walter
Scott has made familiar to modern readers in the
scene where Rebecca looks out from the tower and
relates to Ivanhoe the progress of the siege. No
more certain means is known to lend vividness
and human interest to a narrative, and our
raconteurs have not been slow to take profit
therefrom. Now this rhetorical device was long
ago employed by the Gaelic poets, employed so
frequently and with such mingling of magic
vision that it is on the whole the most striking
peculiarity of their art. Not unlike the simple
manner of Sir Walter is the account of the great
battle given by his chariot driver to Cuchulain,
while the warrior lies wounded after his duel with
Ferdiad; only hardly in Sir Walter will you find
any expression of passionate regret like the cry of
Cuchulain, " My grief! I not to be able to go
THE EPIC OF IRELAND 165
among them!" More symbolic and Gaelic in
spirit is the scene before the raid, when the heroes
of Ulster come to Cruachan, the stronghold of
Maeve, that the queen may decide which of them
deserves the title of champion. The sound of
their furious driving reaches the listeners in the
castle, and then it was that "Findabair of the Fair
Kyebrows, daughter of Ailell and Maeve, went up,
for she had a bird's sight, to her sunny parlour
over the great door of the fort, to tell them what
was coming." One after another she describes
the various heroes in the chariots with their host
of followers. At last she beholds Cuchulain, and
she cries out:
" I see in the chariot a dark sad man, comeliest of the
men of Ireland. A plaited crimson tunic about him,
fastened at the breast with a brooch of inlaid gold; a
long-sleeved linen cloak on him with a white hood em-
broidered with flame-red gold. His eyebrows as black
as the blackness of a spit, seven lights in his eyes, seven
colours about his head, love and fire in his look. Across
his knees there lies a gold-hilted sword, there is a blood-
red spear ready to his hand, a sharp-tempered blade
with a shaft of wood. Over his shoulders a crimson
shield with a rim of silver, overlaid with shapes of beasts
in gold."
There is more here than mere description, or than
the prevailing love of these tellers for radiant
many-blended colours; the blood-red spear is ready
to the hero's hand, and we feel the onrushing of
l66 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
some tremendous event. And Maeve in her mind
knows the meaning of the vision and interprets
it: " Like the sound of an angry sea, like a great
moving wave, with the madness of a wild beast
that is vexed, he leaps through his enemies in the
crash of battle; they hear their death in his shout.
He heaps deed upon deed, head upon head; his
is a name to be put in song."
A name to be put in song! I come in truth to
what lies nearest my heart in this attempt to
awaken interest in a book of ancient legends. It
is well that scholars should make for us a literal,
studiously exact translation of these tales, like,
for example, Miss Winifred Farraday's Cattle
Raid of Cuailgne^ lately published in the Grimm
Library; it is well, still better in my judgment,
that Lady Gregory has gathered them together
and wrought them into something approaching
epic unity; best of all will it be when these in-
spiring themes have been absorbed into the body
of English literature, and have given us, as I
doubt not they will give, great poems that are
both English and modern, yet are pervaded with
that fructifying spirit of true romance which it
has been the one high office of the Celtic peoples
to bestow upon the world. When I see the eager
and vain search for substance in nearly all our liv-
ing poets, their mere schoolgirl's delight in pretty
nature embroidered in pretty words, or even Kip-
ling's melodious Jingoism, I am amazed that some
one of them does not fall upon this treasure-house
THE EPIC OF IRELAND 167
of unrifled inspiration to write for us a new epic,
a truer epic than Tennyson's Idyls of the King,
for he would not be seduced into the sentimental-
ism that clings to so much of the Arthurian tra-
dition. Here at his asking is a theme to which
he might devote all his genius, a labour for which
he might strive, like Milton, to make of himself
first of all a true poem, or school himself in mani-
fold learning like the ollav of ancient days.
I know that Cuchulain and his achievements
have exercised many recent poets of Ireland, but
the right singer has not yet arisen. Ferguson
was brave and manly, but lacked the flower of art;
Aubrey de Vere was cultured and sensitive, but
wanted the informing spirit of originality, so that
his blank verse is Miltonic and Tennysonian by
turns, a thing of shreds and patches. There is,
to be sure, the younger candidates of the Gaelic
revival, but somehow too much of their work
shows the shimmering hues of decadence rather
than the strong colours of life. It is a paradox,
and yet I believe it is true, that if ever these
themes are worked over and moulded into the
universal form of modern art, it will be by Saxon
hands and not by Celtic. Some fatal weakness
would seem to adhere to this gifted race of the
Celts, some incapacity that comes on them, as the
sickness came on the men of Ulster when the need
was most urgent, and prevents them from inherit-
ing the perfect product of their own imagination.
The hated Saxon shall lay hold of their spiritual
l68 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
heritage as he has taken possession of their land,
and no clamorous outcry of patriotic scholars and
of Gaelic leagues shall inhibit him. In the same
way it was the Celt who originated the legend of
King Arthur and his Court, the fairest creation of
the Middle Ages, but it remained for the French-
man to take up the subject and shape it and
rationalise it until it grew to be the fountain-head
of European literature. There is a tradition still
held among the Gaels that Finn and his mighty
comrades are not dead but sleeping, and that one
day they shall arouse themselves and restore the
Gael to his national inheritance, just as the Welsh
look for the coming of King Arthur. It is related
that a lonely wanderer in the hills chanced upon
their resting-place and saw there a horn with the
command graven on it that it should be blown
three times. Once he blew, and the sleepers,
men and dogs, stirred in their slumber. A
second time he blew, and the warriors rose on
their elbows and gazed at him expectantly. But
his nerve failed him then and he fled in terror
from the ghostly spectacle, with the cry of the
prisoners ringing in his ears, "A thousand curses
on you; you have left us worse than you found
us ! " And they are still sleeping, waiting for the
bold Saxon who shall come and shall wind the
magic horn the third time and not be afraid. A
dreamer to the end the Celt remains, but the
waking power of the controlling poet for ever
eludes him:
THE EPIC OF IRELAND 169
Alone among his kind he stands alone,
Torn by the passions of his own sad heart;
Stoned by continual wreckage of his dreams,
He in the crowd for ever is apart.
And besides this inefficiency of the dreamer,
there is in the leaders of the so-called Gaelic re-
vival, a spirit which militates against the produc-
tion of pure art. One feels constantly that these
poets and romancers are too little concerned with
literature for its own sweet sake, and too much
bent, as Spenser wrote long ago, who knew the
Irish people so well, on " the hurt of the English
and the maintenance of their owne lewd libertie."
That is a phrase "their owne lewd libertie"
which expresses admirably the lack of inner re-
straint, of the final shaping force, that made of
these Cuchulain tales, even in the heroic days
when Ireland was capable of great things, a col-
lection of epic fragments marvellously shot
through with lyric beauty, instead of a completed
work of art such as Greece and Rome were able to
create. It is as if the poet, with all his fire and
insight, poet truly though he may have spoken
in prose, never fully understood the material he
was working in, and so failed at the last to de-
velop what came to him as an initial inspiration.
And this failure shows itself in sins both of com-
mission and omission.
There is, first of all, a vein of childishness
which crops up too often just when the tone
I/O
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
should be most serious and tragic. It is charac-
teristic that in the original quarrel of Ailell and
Maeve, on which the whole central story of the
raid hinges, there should be a bit of puerile talk
about a white- horned bull who had left Maeve' s
herd for Ailell' s because he did not think it was
fitting to be under the rule of a woman. Or, to
mention a single other example, in the very midst
of the tremendous feats of Cuchulain the reader
is suddenly shocked out of his tragic sympathy by
hearing that the champion smeared blackberries
on his face to give himself the appearance of a
beard. Not unlike this childishness is the recur-
ring note of exaggeration and grotesque super-
naturalism; it is the magic of the Celt run riot.
To compare these stories with the Iliad, and not
seldom the comparison is perfectly legitimate,
the effect is the same as if the battle of the gods
and the incredible events at the Scamander were
broken up and scattered indiscriminately through-
out the Trojan war. These are sins of commis-
sion which only mean in the end that the
Cuchulain saga, with all its incomparable poetry,
is in its present form mediaeval and not classic
and universal.
And there are faults of omission which tend to
the same result, and which show that the poet,
despite his noble inspiration, was never quite
master of his theme. They are errors of construc-
tion chiefly, a failure to perceive clearly the great
moments of a story and to prepare the mind of the
THE EPIC OF IRELAND I/I
reader for them in advance. Thus there is a cer-
tain resemblance between Cuchulain's use of the
magic Gae Bulg on the last day of the duel with
Ferdiad and the arming of Achilles for his su-
preme encounter with Hector; but mark the dif-
ference. No adequate preparation is made in the
Irish tale for this event; the very name of the
weapon is almost a surprise to the reader and its
form and nature are left altogether obscure,
whereas a long episode in the Iliad is devoted to
the making of Achilles's shield. 1 Again, a poet
quite sure of his art would have developed the
friendship of Cuchulain and Ferdiad early in the
narrative and thus have given some foreboding
of the tragic climax. A more luminous illustra-
tion may be found in a comparison of the pro-
phetic fate of the two heroes, Cuchulain and
Achilles. Both are aware that life is short for
them, that early death is the price they must pay
for glory among men and fame eternal in song.
When Cuchulain is a boy at play in the fields he
hears Cathbad, the Druid, declare that if any
young man should take arms on that day his
name would be greater than any other name in
Ireland, but his span of life would be brief. And
"it is little I would care," said Cuchulain, "if
1 It is hardly necessary to say that I am aware of the
criticism which makes this episode a late addition to
the poem. I speak of the Iliad as it stands, with all its
inconsistencies, still the most perfectly constructed poem
devised by man or men.
1/2 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
my life were to last one day and one night only,
so long as my name and the story of what I have
done would live after me." That is well, but
somehow it is a little lacking in emotional con-
tent, and the foreboding of the hero's death is
quite forgotten in the story that follows. In-
stinctively we recall the scene of the Greek hero,
sitting in solitude and brooding over his destiny:
But Achilles sat far apart from his companions, weep-
ing, on the shore of the grey sea, looking out over the
illimitable ocean; and much he besought his dear mother
with outstretched hands: " Mother, since thou hast
born me for a brief and little life, at least Zeus, the
Thunderer on high Olympus, should have bestowed
honour upon me."
And always throughout the vicissitudes of the
Iliad we remember what destiny hovers over the
young warrior. In the different employment of
this similar material one feels the distinction be-
tween great poetry in its embryonic state and
poetry fully wrought out and achieved.
The same inefficiency penetrates even deeper
into the Irish genius. In his study of The Celtic
Doctrine of Rebirth, Mr. Alfred Nutt has, with no
little acumen, set forth the likeness of the early
mythological age of Ireland to the period in
Greece when the Dionysiac cult was developed.
He finds in the Sidhe, or fairy folk of the Gael,
the same powers of life and increase which were
personified in the Hellenic god of death and
THE EPIC OF IRELAND 173
rebirth, of wine and frenzied ecstasy. It is sig-
nificant that in Ireland these powers became a
tricky race whose acts were inwrought with the
longing of the people for a fair, shadowy other-
world, a Tirnanog or land of the always young, a
heaven of dreams, very beautiful and winsome,
appearing here and there in vision to the lonely
wanderer and inspiring his lyric joys, but without
moral intent or serious influence; whereas from
Dionysus and the mystery of his passion sprang,
in Greece, the greatest and most profoundly moral
drama the world has ever seen. Yet and this,
too, it is fair to say Dionysus and the tragedy
of Greece have passed away, while the simple
peasant of Ireland still beholds glimpses of the
happy Sidhe, and still hears the voices luring him
away to some L,and of Youth that lies beyond the
hills or over the western sea. I cannot but think
that the band of disciples who are attempting to
re-create to-day a literature of Ireland in the Irish
tongue are seduced by the same impalpable visions
that have hovered about their pathetic land from
the beginning. In the day of his strength the
Gael prepared for the world a body of inspiration,
whose haunting but imperfect beauty I have tried
to set forth; now the inheritance lies open to all
people and awaits the cunning hand of the
stranger who shall make it his own.
Yet the honour shall, nevertheless, in a way be
Ireland's. One poet the new movement has pro-
duced, Irish in birth but Saxon and Greek in
174 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
training, Lionel Johnson, whose early death is
still lamented. The restrained power of his ode
on the sorrows of Ireland might seem to justify
the hopes of the most extravagant patriots, were
it not that the form and manner of his writing
show more of the Saxon than of the Gael :
And yet great spirits ride thy winds: thy ways
Are haunted and enchaunted evermore.
Thy children hear the voices of old days
In music of the sea upon thy shore,
In falling of the waters from thine hills,
In whispers of thy trees:
A glory from the things eternal fills
Their eyes, and at high noon thy people sees
Visions, and wonderful is all the air.
So upon earth they share
Eternity: they learn it at thy knees.
P. S. Since the writing of this essay Lady Gregory
has completed her survey of the Irish Sagas by publish-
ing her Gods and Fighting Men, in which she has
brought together into a single volume the Fenian tales
and the legends concerned with the settling of Ireland
and with the races of gods. It must be admitted that,
from no fault of the translator's, the interest of these
later tales is decidedly inferior to that of the earlier.
There is nothing like the same unity of effect as in
the Cuchulain saga, and none of the individual stories in
any way approaches the beauty and sublimity of The
Fate of the Sons of Usnach. The majority of the tales
are about the Fenians, and it is perfectly evident that,
as Dr. Hyde maintains, they are bits of mere folklore
THE EPIC OF IRELAND 175
which have been popular in the mouths of the un-
educated Irish for many hundreds of years; indeed, not
a few of them can be heard in peasant homes to-day.
They are thus peculiarly exposed to that looseness of
conception, that incoherence and failure to grip the
subject, which Matthew Arnold long ago pointed out
as the essential weakness of the Celtic genius. The
Cuchulain tales, on the contrary, seem never to have
enjoyed the same common popularity. They were ap-
parently the property of the great families, and were
told for the benefit of nobles in the banquet hall, much
after the fashion of the Homeric chants. As a con-
sequence they have received more of the discipline of
the shaping imagination, and their emotional content
has been deepened and concentrated. The Fenian saga
is composed for the most part of curious fairy tales,
wherein the law of cause and effect is entirely forgotten
and the reader wanders in a land of childish surprises;
the Cuchulain is an embryonic epic shot through with
the radiant colours of the " magic" of the Celt.
I do not mean to imply by this that the later tales are
without a beauty of their own, but that this beauty is of
a more scattered and unintentional nature. Finn was the
captain of a band of Janissaries (if we may accept the
historic explanation of the legends), who were called
the Fenians (Fianna), and who gradually usurped more
and more power until under Cormac, High King of
Ireland, they were crushed in a great battle and put
down. The stories about these banded soldiers are of
endless battles and brawls and hunting adventures,
wherein demons and fairy folk and marvellous beasts
and vanishing scenes play a principal part.
It is, however, only fair to say that in the end these
tales produce a kind of unity of impression by accumu-
lated effect ; and the conclusion, which relates the well-
known story of Ossian, Finn's son, left alone of all the
176 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
Fenians, an old man in the house of St. Patrick, lament-
ing the decay of the bright pagan world and the gloom
of the new monkish faith, has a touch of genuine sub-
limity. When the saint bids him cry to God for mercy,
the stalwart heathen can only speak of his dear re-
gretted joys : " My story is sorrowful. The sound of
your voice is not pleasant to me. I will cry my fill, but
not for God, but because Finn and the Fianna are not
living.'* And again, quaintly; " Without the cry of the
hounds or the horns, without guarding coasts, without
courting generous women; for all that I have suffered
by the want of food, I forgive the King of Heaven in
my will."
TWO POETS OF THE IRISH MOVEMENT
IF one were to ask Mr. W. B. Yeats what he
considered the chief characteristic of the move-
ment he so ably represents, no doubt the last
word to come to him would be defeat, and yet, if
properly considered, this so-called Gaelic Revival,
this endeavour to resuscitate a bygone past and
to temper the needs of the present to outworn
emotions, is, when all is said, just that and no-
thing more a movement of defeat. I say this
with some confidence, because the visit of Mr.
Yeats among us, to lecture as a guest of the Irish
lyiterary Society, has led me to look through his
successive volumes systematically, and I have
been more than ever impressed by the gradual de-
velopment in them of a sense of failure and decay
rather than of mastery and growth. And the im-
pression has saddened me a little; for I confess to
have become somewhat wearied by the imperial-
istic arrogance of Kipling the great and the lesser
Kiplings, and to have been ready to welcome the
gentler Muse of the Irish poets who are so often
contrasted with him. I had expected, indeed,
' ' to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden
Age, ' * but what really came to my ears was more
za
177
178 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
like an imitation of the bewildered wailings of
decadence which ruled lately in France and which
has swept with it not a few Englishmen such as
Mr. Arthur Symons. Nothing can be further
from the virile passion and pathos, the action and
interknitting of strong characters in the ancient
Irish literature, than this modern ' ' Celtic phan-
tasmagoria," to use Mr. Yeats' s own words,
" whose meaning no man has discovered, nor
any angel revealed." I read the tremendous
story of Deirdre in Lady Gregory's version of the
Irish saga of Cuchulain, and I am filled with the
sorrow of her lamentation as with one of the un-
forgettable sorrows of the world:
" I am Deirdre without gladness, and I at the end of my
life; since it is grief to be without them, I myself will
not be long after them."
After that complaint Deirdre loosed her hair, and threw
herself on the body of Naoise before it was put in the
grave and gave three kisses to him, and when her mouth
touched his blood, the colour of burning sods came into
her cheeks, and she rose up like one that had lost her
wits, and she went through the night till she came to
where the waves were breaking on the strand. And a
fisherman was there and his wife, and they brought her
into their cabin and sheltered her, and she neither smiled
nor laughed, nor took food, drink, or sleep, nor raised
her head from her knees, but crying always after the sons
of Usnach.
I read this noble adaptation of old Irish passion,
and then turn to Mr. Yeats, who attempts to ex-
press " the stir and tumult of defeated dreams "
THE IRISH MOVEMENT
through the mouths of these same heroes of
ancient song, and this, for an example, is what I
find:
Were you but lying cold and dead,
And lights were paling out of the West,
You would come hither, and bend your head,
And I would lay my head on your breast;
And you would murmur tender words,
Forgiving me because you were dead;
Nor would you rise and hasten away,
Though you have the will of the wild birds,
But know your hair was bound and wound
About the stars and moon and sun.
Mr. Yeats has somewhere defined certain poems
as an endeavour " to capture some high, impal-
pable mood in a net of obscure images," and no
little part of his own verse might fall under the
same definition. Too often he appears to strive
after an exalted mysticism by giving the reins to
loose revery, seeming, indeed, not to recognise
any distinction between these two states of mind.
The long tradition of defeat that overshadows his
country has turned him, together with most of
the other singers of a New Ireland, away from
the cruel realities of their world and from the
simple passions that control the impulsive ener-
gies of men into this Celtic twilight of defeated
dreams. In the silence of this retreat from the
world, in the hush that falls after the thunder and
tumult of the passing war gods, one might look
to hear the still small voice of that genuine
180 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
mysticism which, alone of all poetic moods, has
scarcely come to utterance in Knglish poetry. This
would seem to be the true field for these poets who
are so open to impressions of patriotism and
whose native land, dear in innumerable ways, has
suffered so many a sad eclipse. Something of
this higher mysticism was, perhaps, heard in Mr.
Yeats' s earlier poems, but no one can read his
more recent productions without observing what
may be called a defalcation of the mind. Instead
of the true voice of the spirit, we hear the chatter-
ing of old women whose memory is troubled by
vague and foolish superstitions; we perceive a
poet of undoubted powers lending himself to the
mystery mongering of a circle of morbid clerks;
we listen to the revelations of wandering beggars
and workhouse paupers as if they were apocalyp-
tic in origin; we find a man gone out among the
hills to track ' * every old dream that has been
strong enough to fling the weight of the world
from its shoulders," and we get from him idle
ghost stories and babbling repetitions of old wives'
tales. To me, at least, it is all rather sad, for I
should be so willing to accept this vaunted sym-
bolism as a true message from one who has beheld
the vision. Is it too much to say that this is the
poetry of defeat? The " fret," to use an expres-
sive Irish word, is over him, and too long brood-
ing on the sorrow of the land has brought him
to a state perilously like an absconding of the
intellect.
THE IRISH MOVEMENT l8l
Were it not that Mr. Yeats stands as the leader
of a group of young poets who show undoubted
talent and who have just cause for attempting to
form a school of poetry somewhat apart from the
main current of English literature, there would be
no reason for taking his delinquencies seriously.
As it is, one resents this flaccid note in what might
otherwise be a concord of subtle and exquisite
music. As I have said, the real kinship of Mr.
Yeats' s present style is with that of Arthur
Symons, himself a disciple of the French de-
cadents; only one must add in justice that no
taint of moral degeneration has appeared in the
Irish writer and that is much to concede to a
decadent. It would be easy to set forth this kin-
ship by parallel quotations; to show, for instance,
how in both writers the looseness of ideas betrays
itself unmistakably in a curious uncertainty of
rhythm, wherein the accents hover weakly and
dissolve into a fluttering movement utterly differ-
ent from the marching order of .the strong poets.
There is one trick of both (though it is much
more marked in Mr. Yeats) which may seem
trivial, and yet does in some way connect itself
with the total impression of their art. This is an
insistence on the hair in describing women. Just
why this habit should smack of decadence, is not
quite clear to me, but the feeling it inspires is un-
mistakable. Out of curiosity I counted the num-
ber of allusions to hair in the few poems that
make up Mr. Yeats' s Wind among the Reeds ',
182
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
and found they mounted up to twenty-three. It
is "the long dim hair of Bridget," or " the
shadowy blossom of my hair, " or ' ' passion-
dimmed eyes and long heavy hair," or "a
flutter of flower-like hair," or " dim heavy
hair," or the command to " close your eyelids,
loosen your hair." There is a fragile beauty
in these expressions, no doubt, but withal some-
thing troubling and unwholesome ; one thinks
of the less chaste descriptions of Arthur Symons
or the morbid women of Aubrey Beardsley's
pencil rather than of the strong ruddy heroines
of old Irish story. The trait is significant of
much.
Yet I would not be held to deny the loveliness
of many of Mr. Yeats' s poems; above all I have
respect for the pure patriotism that burns through
his language like a clear flame within a vase of
thinly chiselled alabaster, although I believe that
the specific aims of the Gaelic enthusiasts are
tragically misdirected. It may even be the half-
avowed consciousness of this fatal mistake that
has so emphasised the note of defeat in their verse.
At times this patriotic fervour enables Mr. Yeats
to catch the old haunting magic that Matthew
Arnold marked as the chief characteristic of Celtic
literature. So in one of his earlier poems he pic-
tures the supernatural creatures that troubled the
men who were digging into the hill of the Sidhe
folk, and his words might stand with the best of
$uch passages in the Cuchulain :
THE IRISH MOVEMENT 183
At middle night great cats with silver claws,
Bodies of shadow, and blind eyes like pearls
Came up out of the hole, and red-eared hounds
With long white bodies came out of the air
Suddenly, and ran at them and harried them.
One does not soon forget those "blind eyes like
pearls." Elsewhere Mr. Yeats seems to be aware
that the wanton revery of his muse may cut him
off from the fellowship of the " great legion of
Ireland's martyr roll ":
Know that I would accounted be
True brother of that Company,
Who sang to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song.
Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of the dim wisdoms old and deep,
That God gives unto man in sleep.
For the elemental beings go
About my table to and fro.
In flood and fire and clay and wind,
They huddle from man's pondering mind;
Yet he who treads in austere ways
May surely meet their ancient gaze.
If this is the poetry of defeat, it still retains a
vision of pure beauty that is not without a mes-
sage for those whose ears ring with the din of
loud materialistic songs. Nay, I am not prepared
to say that the poet of failure has not his own
1 84
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
place in the chorus that cheers and soothes us
when, at rare intervals perhaps, we seek the con-
solation of verse. How few of us there are who
do not feel at times the wan lethargy of defeat
steal upon us! It is not easy amid the sordid busi-
ness of life, even amid the strong calls of generous
action when these are heard, to pay heed to the
still small voice; and in our moods of dejection
there may perchance be some kinship to spiritual
things in this feeling of defeat, in this surrender
to the vague fleeting shadows that tremble on the
inner eye. The sadness of these poems of Ireland
is justified to us then, and we recall the stanzas
of another poet, * ' in his misery dead, ' ' composed
on the theme of that strange phrase, " To weep
Irish":
The sadness of all beauty at the heart,
The appealing of all souls unto the skies,
The longing locked in each man's breast apart,
Weep in the melody of thine old cries.
Mother of tears ! sweet Mother of sad sighs !
All mourners of the world weep Irish, weep
Ever with thee; while burdened time still runs,
Sorrows reach God through thee, and ask for sleep.
And though thine own unsleeping sorrow yet
Live to the end of burdened time, in pain;
Still sing the song of sorrow ! and forget
The sorrow, in the solace, of the strain.
Lionel Johnson, too, wrote with the sorrow of
Ireland constantly in his heart, and he may be
THE IRISH MOVEMENT 185
called, in one sense, like most of the writers of
this school, a poet of failure; but out of this defeat
he won a firm station of the spirit, as may be seen
in the verses just quoted, very different from the
hazy dreamland of Mr. Yeats. His is the uplifted
courage of Milton:
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost ; the unconquerable will, . . .
And what is else not to be overcome. \
Mr. Johnson's death last year (1902), at the early
age of thirty-five, was an irreparable loss to mod-
ern English literature, and took away from the
little band of Gaelic enthusiasts the one writer who
held his genius in perfect control. There is some-
thing pathetically aloof in the fragmentary story
of his life as it reaches us through his friends. He
was of Irish birth, but received his education at
Winchester and Oxford, coming in his university
years much under the influence of Pater. After
his college days he resided chiefly in London,
writing an occasional article of criticism and send-
ing forth at intervals a poem of refined and
scholarly taste. There was a notable delicacy,
even sanctity, in his character, and " a seal upon
him as of something priestly and monastic. ' ' Al-
ways, indeed, whether at his chambers in Clif-
ford's Inn or elsewhere, he avoided the tumult of
many people though he loved London strangely
and lived the life almost of a recluse. Yet his
warmth of affection for his friends never waned,
186
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
and they in return reverenced the zeal and purity
of his intellectual aims as if he were a man set
apart from the common familiarities of society.
He wrote nobly of friendship, linking it with his
most sacred aspirations:
Each friend possesses, each betrays,
Some secret of the eternal things;
Bach one has walked celestial ways,
And held celestial cotnmunings.
And another poem, composed in his newly won
religious fervour for he became in early manhood
a devout convert to the Roman Church sanctifies
friendship almost as if it were a sacrament of the
faith:
A FRIEND
His are the whitenesses of soul,
That Virgil had; he walks the earth
A classic saint, in self-control,
And comeliness, and quiet mirth.
His presence wins me to repose;
When he is with me, I forget
All heaviness; and when he goes,
The comfort of the sun is set.
But in the lonely hours I learn,
How I can serve and thank him best;
God ! trouble him; that he may turn
Through sorrow to the only rest.
He himself had something in him of the classic
saint. His intellect was trained in the learning
THE IRISH MOVEMENT l8/
of Greece and Rome, and possessed the firmness
and wholesome clearness that we associate with
the word classic. But his body is described as
being, " elfin small and light," like De Quincey's,
and again as "fragile and terribly nervous."
Those who care to read more of the short tragedy
of his life, with its pathetic secret, and of his
death, may find it told in The Month, by Miss
Guiney in her sympathetic manner. It is one of
the pitiably sad and still heroic chapters of our
literary annals. "With all his deference, ' ' writes
Miss Guiney, " his dominant compassion, his
grasp of the spiritual and the unseen, his feet
stood foursquare upon rock. He was a tower of
wholesomeness in the decadence which his short
life spanned. He was no pedant and no prig.
Hesitations are gracious when they are unaffected,
but thanks are due for the one among gentler
critics of our passing hour who cared little to
'publish his wistfulness abroad.' ' ' There lies the
difference. From the wistfulness, I had almost
said the sickliness, of Mr. Yeats who seeks relief
in wasteful re very, we pass to the sternly idealised
sorrow of Lionel Johnson, well knit with intel-
lectual fibre, and we understand that imperious
victory in defeat which Milton personified in his
Satan, thinking more of his own state, one feels,
than of the fallen angel; we are made aware for
the moment of that hidden spirit within us which
triumphs in failure the unconquerable will, and
what is else not to be overcome. It is good to
188 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
read such poetry; there is a fountain in it of con-
solation and which of us in our passage through
the world does not need consolation? and we
drink from it the refreshment of a great courage.
If I were asked to name the ode written in recent
years which exhibits the whitest heat of poetical
emotion expressed in language of the most perfect
and classical restraint, which conforms most
nearly to the great models of old, I should with-
out hesitation name Mr. Johnson's Ireland. Even
in detached stanzas the beauty of the poem car
be entirely lost:
sorrow and the sorrow of the sea
Are sisters; the sad winds are of thy race;
The heart of melancholy beats in thee,
And the lamenting spirit haunts thy face,
Mournful and mighty Mother ! who art kin
To the ancient earth's first woe,
When holy Angels wept, beholding sin.
For not in penance do thy true tears flow,
Not thine the long transgression; at thy
We sorrow not with shame,
But proudly; for thy soul is white as snow.
Proud and sweet habitation of thy dead !
Throne upon throne, its thrones of sorrow filled;
Prince on prince coming with triumphant tread,
All passion, save the love of Ireland, stilled.
By the forgetful waters they forget
Not thee, O Inisfail !
Upon thy fields their dreaming eyes are set,
THE IRISH MOVEMENT 189
They hear thy winds call ever through each vale.
Visions of victory exalt and thrill
Their hearts' whole hunger still;
High beats their longing for the living Gael.
Sweet Mother ! in what marvellous dear ways
Close to thine heart thou keepest all thine own !
Far off, they yet can consecrate their days
To thee, and on the swift winds westward blown
Send thee the homage of their hearts, their vow
Of one most sacred care;
To thee devote all passionate power, since thou
Vouchsafest them, O land of love! to bear
Sorrow and joy with thee. Bach far son thrills
Toward thy blue dreaming hills,
And longs to kiss thy feet upon them, Fair !
One needs no drop of Irish blood in his veins to
feel the exaltation and minstrelsy of the poet's
mood. One feels, too, the strange mingling of
passion and aloofness, of melancholy and triumph,
that speaks in almost every poem of his two slender
volumes. I have contrasted his art with that of
Mr. Yeats; there is a certain fitness in quoting the
living poet's appreciation of his fallen compeer.
Lionel Johnson, he writes, " has made a world full
of altar lights and golden vestures and murmured
Latin and incense clouds and autumn winds and
dead leaves, where one wanders, remembering
martyrdoms and courtesies that the world has
forgotten. His ecstasy is the ecstasy of combat,
not of submission to the Divine will; and even
when he remembers that ' the old Saints prevail,'
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
he sees the ' one ancient Priest ' who alone offers
the Sacrifice, and remembers the loneliness of
the Saints. Had he not this ecstasy of com-
bat, he would be the poet of those peaceful
and unhappy souls, who, in the symbolism of
a living Irish visionary, are compelled to in-
habit when they die a shadowy island Para-
dise in the West. " It is this ' ' ecstasy of
combat, ' ' this triumph of defeat I choose to call
it, that, in my judgment, marks Mr. Johnson as
the one great, shall I say, and genuinely signi-
ficant poet of the present Gaelic movement. Yet
how apt Mr. Yeats' s criticism is may be seen from
the poem Sertorius, in which the vague longing
of these Irish dreamers is told in a parable of the
Roman leader in Spain. All the world knows the
story of Sertorius, and of his white hind which
the soldiers worshipped as an oracle of Diana.
lyike the wistful visionaries of Ireland, his
thoughts turned in the hour of defeat to the
fabled islands of the Hesperides, where peace and
eternal hopes dwell in the misty West. How he
went not on that journey but was slain traitor-
ously at a banquet is recorded in history.
SERTORIUS
Beyond the Straits of Hercules,
Behold ! the strange Hesperian seas,
A glittering waste at break of dawn;
High on the westward plunging prow,
What dreams are on thy spirit now,
Sertorius of the milk-white fawn ?
THE IRISH MOVEMENT 19!
Not sorrow to have done with home !
The mourning destinies of Rome
Have exiled Rome's last hope with thee;
Nor dost thou think on thy lost Spain.
What stirs thee on the unknown main ?
What wilt thou from the virgin sea ?
Hailed by the faithless voice of Spain,
The lightning warrior come again,
Where wilt thou seek the flash of swords,
Voyaging toward the set of sun ?
Though Rome the splendid East hath won,
Here thou wilt find no Roman lords.
No Tingis here lifts fortress walls;
And here no Lusitania calls;
What hath the barren sea to give ?
Yet high designs enchaunt thee still;
The winds are loyal to thy will;
Not yet art thou too tired to live.
No trader thou, to northern isles,
Whom mischief-making gold beguiles
To sunless and unkindly coasts;
What spirit pilots thee thus far
From the tempestuous tides of war,
Beyond the surging of the hosts ?
Nay ! this thy secret will must be.
Over the visionary sea,
Thy sails are set for perfect rest;
Surely thy pure and holy fawn
Hath whispered of an ancient lawn,
Far hidden down the solemn West.
SHELBURNE ESSAYS
A gracious pleasaunce of calm things;
There rose-leaves fall by rippling springs;
And captains of the older time,
Touched with mild light, or gently sleep,
Or in the orchard shadows keep
Old friendships of the golden prime.
The far seas brighten with grey gleams;
O winds of morning ! O fair dreams !
Will not that land rise up at noon ?
There, casting Roman mail away,
Age long to watch the falling day,
And silvery sea, and silvern moon.
Dreams ! for they slew thee; Dreams ! they lured
Thee down to death and doom assured;
And we were proud to fall with thee.
Now, shadows of the men we were,
Westward indeed we voyage here,
Unto the end of all the sea.
Woe ! for the fatal, festal board;
Woe ! for the signal of the sword,
The wine-cup dashed upon the ground ;
We are but sad, eternal ghosts,
Passing far off from human coasts,
To the wan land eternal bound.
TOLSTOY; OR, THE ANCIENT FEUD BE-
TWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND ART
THIS has been a century of strange conversions,
and not least strange among these is Count Leo
Tolstoy's abdication of an art in which he had
won world- wide reputation for the r61e of prophet
and iconoclast. ' ' What is Art ? " he has asked
himself, and his published answer, 1 the outcome
of fifteen years of meditation, is a denial of all that
has made art noble in the past, and a challenge to
those who seek to continue that tradition in the
present. Furthermore he has put his theory into
practice in a long and powerful novel, Resurrec-
tion? Naturally such a renunciation on the part
of an undisputed master in the craft caused no
small commotion among poets and critics. Many
of these, chiefly of the French school, shrugged
their shoulders and smiled at a theory that would
reject the works of Sophocles and Dante and
Shakespeare as "savage and meaningless," and
find in Uncle Tom's Cabin the acme of art toward
1 What is Art ? By Leo F. Tolstoy. New York :
T. Y. Crowell & Co.
2 Resurrection. By Leo F. Tolstoy. New York:
Dodd, Mead & Co.
.93
IQ4 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
which the ages have been tending. Others have
taken the quasi prophet more seriously, and with
much ingenuity have pointed out the seeming
flaws in his argument. Must I for my part con-
fess that I have been chiefly impressed by the ter-
rible and relentless logic of the book ? It is easy
to smile; it is easy to denounce the work as " lit-
erary nihilism put into practice by a converted
pessimist." Pessimist and fanatic and barbarian
Tolstoy may be, and to judge from his portrait
alone he is all these; yet I know not how we shall
escape his ruthless conclusions unless we deny
resolutely his premises, and these are in part what
our age holds as its dearest heritage of truth.
Furthermore, his theoretic book may claim to be
only the latest blow struck in a quarrel as old as
human consciousness itself. Long ago Plato,
himself a renegade from among the worshippers
of beauty, could speak of ' * the ancient feud be-
tween philosophy and art," and to-day one of the
barbarians of the North has delivered a shrewd
stroke in the same unending conflict.
Least of all should we have expected to find in
Greece this lurking antipathy between art and
philosophy, for there, if anywhere in the world,
truth and beauty seem to us to have walked hand
in hand. It is curious that the school of Socrates,
which did so much to introduce a formal divorce
between these ideas, should have been so fond of
the one word that more than any other expresses
the intimate union of beauty and goodness.
TOLSTOY 195
Kalokagathia, beauty-and-goodness, ''that solemn
word in which even the gods take delight," was
ever on their lips. In the beginning, no doubt,
this strangely compounded term conveyed the
simple thought still dear to our own youth when
a fair face seems naturally and inevitably the
index of a noble soul. That indeed is the ideal
which we believe the truest gentlemen of Athens
actually attained; we think we see it portrayed in
the statues bequeathed to us by the land; it is at
least the goal toward which Greek art ever strove
as the reintegration of life. But after all we must
confess that this harmonj'- of the inner and the
outer vision was but an ideal in Greece, such as
has now and again glanced before other eyes,
only appearing not quite so fitfully there and ap-
proaching at times nearer the reality. Had it been
anything more than a desire of the imagination,
the history of the world would have been some-
thing quite different from the vexed pages of
growth and decay which we now read. Perhaps,
too, Joubert was not entirely wrong when he said
that ' ' God, being unable to bestow truth upon the
Greeks, gave them poesy." Achilles, fair with-
out and noble within, was the glory of the race;
but too often the reality was like Paris, divinely
beautiful and beloved of the goddess, but hollow
at heart. From an early date the wise men of the
land foresaw the threatened danger. Pythagoras,
who descried the poets tortured in hell, was not
the only prophet to denounce their travesty of the
196 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
gods; nor was Solon the only sage who looked
askance on the stage.
But Socrates, the first man of the Western world
to attain to full self-consciousness, was the first
also to ask seriously, What are truth and good-
ness ? and what is beauty ? And though in
general he would deprive beauty of its peril, by
reducing it to a mere matter of utility, yet at
times he seems as a philosopher to have recog-
nised its doubtful allurements. Xenophon reports
an amusing conversation with his master on the
nature of kissing, wherein Socrates in his usual
style of badinage hints at this hidden peril.
" Know you not," says he, " that this monster,
whom you call beauty and youth, is more terrible
than venomous spiders? These can sting only
by contact, but that other monster injects his
poison from a distance if a man but rest his eyes
upon .him." In another book we read Socrates's
misgivings in regard to the current meaning of
the word kalokagathia. He with his contempo-
raries had supposed that a necessary harmony
existed between virtue and a man's outer sem-
blance, until experience brought its cruel awak-
ening. Beauty, which as a Greek he could not
omit from the composition of a full man, became
thenceforth for him, as for the rest of the world,
mere grace of inner character, scarcely distinguish-
able from goodness itself. This idea is naively
developed in a conversation with the country
gentleman of the (Economicus, where Socrates
TOLSTOY 197
asks his old friend how despite his homely ex-
terior he has won the reputation of uniting perfect
beauty and goodness.
If we are a little surprised to hear the contem-
porary of Phidias and Sophocles speak doubtfully
of the office of beauty, what shall we think of his
disciple Plato, who was himself in youth a poet,
and who in manhood was master of all styles,
and able to drape in the robes of fancy the barest
skeleton of logic ? He, if any one, has given us
" the sweet foode of sweetly uttered knowledge,"
and we further may say of him, with Sir Philip
Sidney, " almost hee sheweth himselfe a passion-
ate lover, of that unspeakable and everlasting
beautie to be seene by the eyes of the minde, onely
cleered by fay th ' ' ; and yet Plato knew and could
avow that "to prefer beauty to virtue was the real
and utter dishonour of the soul." I can imagine
that to one bred on the visions of poetry and by
birth a worshipper of all the fair manifestations of
Nature, nothing could be more disconcerting than
to follow the changes of Plato's doctrine in this
regard. In the earlier dialogues physical comeli-
ness is but a symbol of inner grace, a guide to
lead us in the arduous and perilous ascent of the
soul; and his theory of love was to become the
teacher of idealism to a new world. In The Re-
public the cardinal virtues are blent into one per-
fect harmony of character so alluring as to seem
the reflection in his mind of all the visual charm
he had seen in Hellas. But even here his change
198 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
of attitude is apparent; this same dialogue con-
tains that bitter diatribe against poetry and music
which would banish inexorably all the magicians
of art from his ideal state, because they draw the
mind from the contemplation of abstract truth to
dwell upon her deceptive i mitations. The world
has not forgotten and will never forget how these
greatest Athenians turned away their eyes from
what had given their land its splendid predomi-
nance. Socrates' s question, What is beauty ? was
the "little rift within the lute," that was to widen
until the music of Greece became hushed for ever.
We may liken the texture of art to that floating
garment of gauze, inwoven with a myriad forms
and symbols, in which the goddess Natura was
wont to appear to the visionary eyes of the school-
men: we may liken it to the clouds that drift
across the sky, veiling the effulgence of the sun
and spreading an ever variable canopy of splendour
between us and the unfathomed abyss: we may
better liken it to the curtain that hung in the
temple before the holy of holies; and the rending
of the curtain from top to bottom may signify a
changed aspect in the warfare of our dual nature.
A new meaning and acrimony enter into the con-
flict henceforth. Christianity introduced, or at
least strongly emphasised, those principles that
were in the end to make possible such an utter re-
volt as Tolstoy's. With the progress of the new
era, the feud between philosophy and art will take
on a thousand different disguises, appearing now
TOLSTOY 199
as a contest between religion and the senses, and
again as a schism within the bosom of the Church
itself. To the followers of Christ, the indwelling
of divinity is no longer made evident by beauty
of external form, for their incarnate deity came to
them as one in whom there was ' ' no form nor
comeliness ' ' nor any * ' beauty that we should de-
sire him.'/ Instead of magnanimity and magnifi-
cence the world shall learn to honour humility; a
different sense shall be given to the word equality,
and the individual soul will assume importance
from its heavenly destiny, and not from its earthly
force or impotence; the ambition to make life
splendid shall be sunk in humanitarian surrender
to the weak; the genial command of the poet,
" Doing righteousness make glad your heart,"
shall be changed to the shrill cry of the monk,
' ' But woe unto those that know not their own
misery; and woe yet greater unto those that love
this miserable and corrupted life! " Not that the
old desire of loveliness shall be utterly routed from
the world; but more and more it will be severed
from the life of the spirit, and appear more and
more as the seducer, and not the spouse, of the
soul.
As in so many other things St. Augustine
voices in this matter also the sentiment of the
Christian world. He who in youth had written a
treatise On the Fit and the Beautiful, turned after
his conversion to bewail his unregenerate infatua-
tion over the charms of Virgil. The grace of the
200 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
natural world became for him only a ''snare of
the eyes " ; and so fearful is he of the " delight of
the ears" that he hesitates to accept even the
singing in the church.
To the same horror of the lust of the eye and
the pride of life may be traced in part the anoma-
lous attitude of the Fathers and later churchmen
toward women. It was the mission of the new
faith to promulgate the distinctly feminine virtues
in place of the sterner ideals of antiquity, love in
place of understanding, sympathy for justice, self-
surrender for magnanimity, and as a consequence
the eternal feminine was strangely idealised, giving
us in religion the worship of the Virgin Mary,
and in art the raptures of chivalry culminating in
Dante's adoration of Beatrice. But there is a
darker side to the picture. Because the men of
the new faith could not acquiesce in any simple
life of the senses, woman must be either ethereal-
ised into an abstraction of religious virtues, or, if
taken humanly, must be debased as the bearer of
all the temptations of the flesh. She is the earthly
vision of heaven or hell, unless to some more
human satirist she appears simply as purgatory.
It is painful to read the continuous libel of the
mediaeval schoolmen upon woman; from St. An-
thony down she is the real devil dreaded by the
pious, a personification of the libido sentiendi.
This same revolt from the senses reaches a dra-
matic crisis in the eighth century under Leo the
iconoclastic Kmperor; and iconoclasm, though
TOLSTOY 201
largely the work of a single man, produced far-
reaching results in history, hastening the final
disruption of the East and the West, and estab-
lishing the Pope more firmly on his seat. It may
seem that Plato's philosophic feud with art has
assumed a grotesque disguise when championed
by rude fanatic mobs wreaking their vengeance
on altars and images; yet it is but the same
quarrel in a new and more virulent form. It is
significant, too, of an antagonism within the
Christian fold itself which even to this day has
not been fully allayed. The old dispensation had
forbidden the making of graven images; Christ
had declared that God should be worshipped
neither in Jerusalem nor in Samaria; his worship
was to be of the spirit alone. And it was to sat-
isfy this negative suprasensuous side of religion
that the Byzantine Emperor instituted his reform.
He failed, but was at least a forerunner of the
Reformation which was largely a revolt of the
Northern races against the instinct of the South
to clothe abstract ideas in form and colour. L,uther
was the great and successful iconoclast.
But no religious aspiration could entirely deaden
the appeal of the senses. During the heat of the
iconoclastic debate, John of Damascus had given
fervent expression to the soul's need of visible
symbols. "Thou perchance," he writes, "art
lifted up and set further apart from this material
world; thou walkest above this body as if borne
down by no weight of the flesh, and mayst despise
2O2 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
whatever thine eyes behold. But I, who am a
man and clothed in the body, desire to converse
with holy things in the body and to see them with
mine eyes. ' ' And again he asseverates that those
who wish to be united to God in the mind alone
should go further and take from the Church her
lamps, her sweet-smelling incense, her chanted
prayers, and the very sacraments which are of
material nature, and all these things were indeed
to be swept away in good time. But in the mean-
while Christianity had produced its own legiti-
mate form of art, different utterly from the brave
parade of paganism, yet not without its justifica-
tion. The artist did not seek for pure beauty, for
that intimate harmony of sense and spirit which
had been the ideal of Greece; matter is now con-
strained to express the humility, the ascetic dis-
dain, the spiritual aspiration and loneliness of the
soul. Yet one other, and perhaps the most es-
sential, aspect of the faith, the humanitarian
sense of brotherhood and equality, must wait for
the nineteenth century for its complete utterance.
If the Reformation was but a prolongation of
the iconoclastic sentiment with certain new ele-
ments of moral and political antipathy added, the
Renaissance in the South was a deliberate attempt
to re-establish the old pagan harmony. But
something artificial and hollow soon showed itself
in the movement. The true balance was never
attained, or if attained was held but for a moment;
and the sensuous love of beauty, severed from the
TOLSTOY 203
deeper moral instincts of humanity, dragged out
a spurious existence, until now it is seen in the
most degraded forms of modern French art.
This is not the place to follow the conflict of our
dual nature through all the ramifications of his-
tory. Those who wish to study it in its most dra-
matic moment may turn to the story of Kngland
in the seventeenth century, or read John Ingle-
sant, where it developed into a romance of curious
fascination. And to us of America at least the
struggle of that period must always possess
singular interest; for out of it grew the intellectual
life of our nation, and even to-day the poverty of
our art and literature is partly due to the fact that
our strongest colonists brought with them only
one faction of the endless feud.
For the feud is not settled and can never be
settled while human nature remains what it is.
To-day the man who approaches the higher intel-
lectual life is confronted by the same question
that troubled Plato. He who can choose without
hesitation between art and religion, or between
the new antinomy of literature and science, has
climbed but a little way on the ladder of experi-
ence. There was a parable current among the
Greeks, and still to be found in our modern school
readers, which tells how the youthful Hercules
in the pathway of life was met by two women who
represented virtue and pleasure, and who bade
him choose between the careers they offered.
And it has often seemed to me that the fable
204 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
might be applied without much distortion to
many an ardent man who in his youth goes out
into the solitudes to meditate on the paths of am-
bition, his choice lying not between virtue and
pleasure, but between the philosophic and the
imaginative life. As he sits musing in some such
solitude of the spirit, we can discern two feminine
forms approach him, very tall and stately, one
of them good to look upon and noble in stature,
clad in modest raiment, and with a brooding gaze
of austerity in her eyes as if troubled by no vision
of turbid existence; the other more radiant in face,
and richer and more alluring in form, with wide
open eyes that might be mirrors for all the de-
lightful things of nature, and dressed in a floating
transparent robe wherein are woven figures of
many strange flowers and birds. She of the flut-
tering garment comes forward before the other,
and greets the youth effusively, and bids him fol-
low her, for she will lead him by a pleasant path
where he shall suffer no diminution of the desires
of his heart, neither be withheld from the fulness
of earthly experience, but always he shall behold
a changing vision of wonder and beauty, and in
the end be received into the palace of Fame.
Here the youth asks by what name she is known,
and she replies: " My friends call me Fancy, and
I dwell in the meadows of Art, but my enemies
call me Illusion." In the meanwhile the other
woman has drawn near, and now she says to the
young man: " Nay, follow me rather, and I will
TOLSTOY 2O5
show you the true value of life. I will not de-
ceive you with cunning seductions of the eye and
ear that lead only to distraction in the end. The
road in which I shall guide you lies apart from
the vanities and triumphs of earthly hopes; the
way of renunciation will seem hard to tread at
first, but slowly a new joy of the understanding
will be awakened in you, born of a contempt for
the fleeting illusions of this world, and in the end
you shall attain to another and higher peace that
passeth understanding. I am named Insight, and
by some my home is called Philosophy and by
others Religion." I can fancy that some such
parting of the ways has come to many of those
who by choosing resolutely have won renown as
artists or seers. I can believe that some who
have elected the smoother path have even in the
full triumph of success felt moments of regret for
the other life of ascetic contemplation.
More than one great artist, to be sure, has
vaunted the perfect efficacy of his craft to satisfy
the human soul; more than one poet has pub-
lished his Defence of Poetry, and declared with
Shelley that "the great instrument of moral good
is the imagination, and poetry administers to the
effect by acting upon the cause." Even Horace
has written his * c melius Chrysippo et Crantore ' ' ;
and no doubt in the last analysis the poets are
right. Yet still the haunting dread will thrust
itself on the mind, that in accepting, though it
be but as a symbol, the beauty of the world, we
206 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
remain the dupes of a smiling illusion. And
something of this dread seems to rise to the sur-
face now and again in the works of those who
have penetrated most deeply into art and life. So
the pathos of Shakespeare's sonnets may be chiefly
due to the effect upon us of seeing a great and
proud genius humiliated before a creature of the
court. Not all his supremacy of art could quite
recompense the poet for his uneasiness before the
fine assurance of noble birth, or cover completely
the "public means which public manners breeds ' ' ;
but gathering the hints here and there in the son-
nets and comparing them with the scattered pas-
sages of disillusionment in the plays, I seem to
read a deeper discontent with the artistic life, a
feeling that he had not been faithful to his own
truer self.
Alas, 't is true I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is
most dear,
Made old offences of affections new;
Most true it is that I have look'd on truth
Askance and strangely,
he writes in one of the sonnets; and may it not
be that this petulant discontent is partly responsi-
ble for his failure to care for the preservation of
his works ?
Still more striking is the attitude of Michael
Angelo in old age toward the occupation of his
TOLSTOY 207
life. I trust I may be pardoned for giving at
length a translation of the well-known sonnet in
which the supreme artist turns at last for conso-
lation to a L/ove above his earthly love:
After the seas tempestuous, lo, I steer
My fragile bark with all my hopes aboard
Unto that common haven where the award
Of each man's good and evil must appear.
Wherefore the phantasie I held so dear,
That made of art my idol and my lord,
Too well I know is all with errors stored,
And man's desires that bind him helpless here.
Those amorous thoughts that lightly moved my
breast,
What do they now when near two deaths I toss,
One certain here, one threatening yet above?
Not painting now nor sculpture lulls to rest;
The soul hath turned to that diviner Love
Whose arms to clasp us opened on the cross.
It would be absurd to compare the words and
actions of Tolstoy with the great names already
cited, were it not that the Russian novelist is a
true spokesman of certain tendencies of the age.
To be sure, the religious aspect of the ancient feud
has for the present been much obscured, and the
most notable conflict to-day is undoubtedly be-
tween the imagination and the analytical spirit of
science. But within the realm of art itself a curi-
ous division has appeared which is still intimately
connected with the religious instinct though in
a new form; and on this present aspect of the
208 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
question the career of Tolstoy will be seen to throw
an instructive light.
The humanitarian side of Christianity had been
more or less concealed throughout the Middle
Ages by the anxiety for personal salvation. In
such a work as the Imitation the brotherhood of
mankind taught by the Apostles was quite smoth-
ered by a refined and spiritual form of egotism;
nor can we imagine a St. John declaring, * ' As
often as I have gone forth among men, I have re-
turned home less a man." Both the isolation
peculiar to such an ideal and the spirituality
which it had in common with earlier Christianity
were impossible after the humanism of the Renais-
sance and the scepticism of the eighteenth century.
Instead of these many things conspired together
at the opening of the nineteenth century to em-
phasise that other phase of Christianity, the be-
lief in the divine right of the individual and
the brotherhood of man. Deprive this belief
of spirituality, and add to it a sort of moral im-
pressionism which abjures the judgment and
appeals only to the emotions, and you have the
humanitarian religion of the age. And naturally
the most serious art of the times has reflected this
movement.
So, for example, Wordsworth has been much
lauded as the high priest of Nature, whereas in re-
ality the important innovation introduced by him
into English poetry is not his appreciation of Na-
ture but his humanitarianism, his peculiarly senti-
TOLSTOY 209
mental attitude toward humble life. This, and
not any feeling of the exigencies of art, for his
later work shows that he had no such artistic sensi-
tiveness, is the true source of his determination
to employ ' ' the language of conversation in the
middle and lower classes of society." Art is no
longer the desire of select spirits to ennoble and
make beautiful their lives, but an effort to touch
and elevate the common man and to bring the
proud into sympathy with the vulgar. And this,
too, explains Wordsworth's choice of such humble
themes as Michael, and The Idiot Boy, and a host
of the same sort. The genius of Wordsworth was
in this prophetic of what was to be the deepest re-
ligious instinct of the age; and if this instinct has
as yet produced few great poetic names besides
that of Wordsworth himself and Shelley, yet the
strength of such a novel as Miss Wilkins's Jerome
and the public reception of such a poem as The
Man with the Hoe (horresco refer ens) show perhaps
how deep a hold the feeling is to have on the lit-
erature of the immediate future.
As a revolt against this ideal and a feeble pro-
longation of the aims of the Renaissance, the con-
trary school of Art for Art's sake has arisen, in
which beauty, like a bodiless phantom of desire,
lures the seeker ever further and further from real
life, weaning him from the healthier aspiration of
his time, and only too often plunging him into the
mire of acrid sensuality. The Goncourts in their
Journal have admirably expressed the wasteful
2IO SHELBURNE ESSAYS
illusion of this search: "Le tourment de I'homme
de pensee est d'aspirer au Beau, sans avoir jamais
line conscience fixe et certaine du Beau." We
wonder to what hidden recess of the world the old
Greek vision of the union of beauty and virtue has
flown, and if that too is only an empty phantom
of the mind.
Such, it seems to me, is the present form of the
ancient feud between philosophy and art, now
waged within the field of art itself if this am-
biguous use of the word may be pardoned. The
complexity of life of course does much to obscure
the contrast of these two tendencies, but it is nat-
ural that a man of Tolstoy's race, with his bar-
baric use of logic and his intemperate scorn of the
golden mean, should see the contrast in its naked-
ness and fling himself into the battle with fanatic
ardour. But perhaps he himself does not under-
stand, and others may not at first perceive, how
much he has in common with the decadent artists
whom he attacks, and how the true opponent of
that tendency would be the man of sufficient in-
sight to present to the world a new and adequate
ideal of the beautiful.
Tolstoy's definition of art is very clear and con-
sistent:
Art [he maintains] is not, as the metaphysicians say,
the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty, or
God ; it is not ... a game in which man lets off
his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of
man's emotion by external signs; it is not the production
TOLSTOY
of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but
it is a means of union among men, joining them to-
gether in the same feelings, and indispensable for the
life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of
humanity. . . . To evoke in one's self a feeling one
has experienced, and . . . so to transmit that feeling
that others may experience the same feeling this is the
activity of art.
Tolstoy's position is precise, but in the end does
he offer any ideal more than the decadent who
seeks beauty as a refined, or even gross, means of
pleasure, or than the pure humanitarian who sym-
pathises with mankind without any ulterior spirit-
ual insight ? I cannot see how the reformer has
passed beyond mere impressionism, and impres-
sionism is one of his most hated foes. The end
of art for him is simply to transmit feeling from
man to man. He distinctly denies the office of
the intellect in art, ascribing this to science, and
he has left no room for the higher appeal to the
will. The strength of the impression conveyed is
the final criterion of excellence. The artist is
amenable to no laws, and his work is not subject
to interpretation or to criticism. "One of the
chief conditions of artistic creation," he says, "is
the complete freedom of the artist from every kind
of preconceived demand." The whim of the in-
dividual is the supreme arbiter of taste. Sym-
pathy, and not judgment, is the goal of culture.
Nor does the old notion of beauty suffer less at his
hands. To him the Greeks were but savages (it is
212 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
a Russian who speaks), and their conception of the
kalokagathia the result of sheer ignorance. There
is no ideal which beauty serves, and its application
to character is a mere abuse of words. To him,
as to the decadents and the humanitarians, beauty
is no more than a name for pleasure, and no ex-
planation can be given why any object should
please one man and displease another. So far we
are on ground common to both humanitarianism
and decadent art; but at this point occurs the di-
vision, and Tolstoy as a true schismatic throws
himself on one side with the whole vehemence of
his nature.
Seeing that the pursuit of beauty as something
unconnected with character is a most insidious
danger, and that art which possesses such an aim
must inevitably become corrupt, he cuts the Gord-
ian knot by discarding beauty altogether as one
< f the elements of art. In place of it he would
complete his theory of impressionism and the di-
vine right of the individual by adding the moral
intention which makes of these a religion. The
old ideal of art had been sought in the union of
the higher intellect and the aspirations of the will
touched with emotion; and the final court of ap-
peal was the taste of the man who had attained to
the most perfect harmony of culture and to the
fullest development of character. Tolstoy, on the
contrary, carries his doctrine of individualism to
the extreme. If the light treatment of so grave
a subject may be pardoned,
TOLSTOY 213
He is the same as the Chartist who spoke at a meeting in
Ireland,
" What, and is not one man, fellow men, as good as
another?"
" Faith," replied Pat " and a deal better too ! "
Some criterion of value he must have, and to find
this he turns to the judgment of the common
Russian peasant. Nothing gives a better idea of
the change of civilisation than to compare Tols-
toy's constant reference of art to the simple un-
tutored countryman, with the attitude of a man
like Pindar in the old Greek days, or with the
contempt of our Elizabethans for "the breath that
comes from the uncapable multitude; ' ' for it must
be remembered that, after all, the Russian fanatic
is a man of the age, and that hidden in the heart
of each of us lies this same curious deference to
the untrained individual. And in spite of this in-
dividualism, or should we say in consequence of
it ? Tolstoy has attained his own conception of
universality as a basis for art. It was formerly
the belief of the sages that by ascending the ladder
of intellectual experience a man might leave be-
hind the desires and emotions in which his
personal life was bound up, and reach a purer at-
mosphere where only his truer universal self could
breathe. And this obscurely and dimly was the
belief of the poet. But Tolstoy would find the
universal by descending. Art has nothing to do
with the intellect or with the will, or yet with
the exclusive emotions of a falsely isolated and
214 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
corrupted aristocracy, but appeals to the heart of
the humblest man, in whom the universal feelings
of humanity have not been covered over by culture
or luxury. At least, as a revolt against the ex-
clusiveness of art for art's sake, this acceptance
of hurnanitarianism in its crudest form is a real
advance. "The feeling of pride, the feeling of
sexual desire, and the feeling of weariness of life,"
are indeed not the true themes of art, and better
than these are " humility, purity, compassion,
love." "Art," he says, "is not a pleasure, a
solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter; "
and we may forgive him much for that trumpet
call. Art is indeed to him the handmaid of re-
ligion. Of the spiritual quest of the individual
soul to sever himself from the world and to lose
himself in communion with God, little or nothing
remains: the very words sound meaningless in our
ears. Let us not deceive ourselves: our religion
is, as Tolstoy states, " the new relation of man to
the world around him; ' ' and in the effort to escape
by means of humility and universal sympathy
from the anarchy and selfishness of individualism,
art, regarded as the transmission of feeling from
man to man, may be a great force. It thus be-
comes with science one of the two organs of hu-
man progress, science pertaining to the intellect
and art dealing with the interchange of emotions.
Progress to Tolstoy, as to the rest of his genera-
tion, is the battle-cry of the new faith, for " re-
ligious perception is nothing else than the first
TOLSTOY 215
indication of that which is coming into existence."
If you ask him toward what far-off divine event
this progress tends, he will answer with the clos-
ing words of his book, the " brotherly union
among men." Nor, until some ulterior goal is
proclaimed, can I see that the humanitarianism of
Tolstoy or of any other doctrinaire saves us from
this vicious circle of attempting to unite men for
the mere sake of union.
And in the case of Tolstoy this humanitarian
religion is marred by a stain that marks it pe-
culiarly as a falling away from the real doctrine
of Christ on which he builds as on a foundation.
He claims to announce to a forgetful age the true
Gospel of Jesus, and the solemnity and undoubted
sincerity of his appeal have startled many hearers
from their apathy. They hear the very speech
of Christ on his lips and wonder whether after all
this humanitarianism of the day is the perfect and
purified revival of the mission preached by the
Messiah to the Old World which could not under-
stand him. They hear the very speech of Christ,
yet their hearts are only troubled by what they
hear and no peace of conviction follows. They
are torn by the diversity of their feelings, and,
finding no flaw in the pitiless logic of the prophet,
are ready often to deny the authority of the Master
whose words he repeats.
Count Tolstoy accepts without reservation the
plain precepts of the Gospel, and demands our
adherence to the strict letter of the law. This
2l6 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
may be well, although possibly it denotes some-
thing of the false logic of fanaticism to dwell so
persistently on the one command, " Resist not
evil." But deeper than the commands lies the
spirit of Christ; and he who follows the law of the
Gospel without heeding the spirit, wherein does
he differ from the Pharisees of the old dispensation
whom Christ so vehemently denounced ?
If you ask in what respect Tolstoy misses the ;
heart of true religion and of Christ, I would re-
ply in the words of a famous Frenchwoman, " La
joie de V esprit en marque la force" the joy of the
spirit is the measure of its force. It may seem
trifling to confront the solemn exhortation of a
prophet with the words of Ninon de PEnclos,
whose chief claim on our memory is the scanda-
lous story of her grandson, who killed himself on
discovering that he had fallen in love unwittingly
with his own grandmother; and yet I know not
where a saner criticism could be found of the ar-
rogant dogmatism of this Russian bigot. There
is no joy in Tolstoy, and lacking joy he lacks the
deepest instinct of religion. I know that here and
there a sentence, or even a page, may be quoted
from Tolstoy that sounds as if he had discovered
joy in his new faith, and I know that he repeats
volubly the glad tidings that are said to have
made the angels sing as they never sang before;
but it needs no more than a glance at the rigid,
glaring eyes of the old man to feel that the soul
within him feeds on bitter and uncharitable
TOLSTOY 2i;
thoughts, and it needs but a little familiarity with
his later work in fiction to learn that the ground
of his spirit is bitterness and denunciation and
despair.
It is natural that a writer of Tolstoy's gloomy
convictions should deny the validity of beauty
and should call the Greeks ignorant savages be-
cause they believed in beauty. His own later
work shows an utter absence of the sense of
beauty and joy. The drama called La Puissance
des Tenures I do not know that it has ever been
translated into English is one of the most revolt-
ing and heart-sickening productions of the past
century. The imagination of the author has ap-
parently dwelt on unclean objects until it has be-
come crazed with a mingled feeling toward them
of attraction and repulsion.
Count Tolstoy takes his law of righteousness
from the Sermon on the Mount, and that is well;
but he has forgotten the song of joy that runs like
a golden thread through that discourse * ' Blessed
are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted.
. . . Rejoice, and be exceeding glad." Out
of the preaching of Christ proceeds the wonderful
and beautiful lesson of the fowls of the air and of
the lilies of the field; out of the preaching of
Tolstoy comes the loathsome Powers of Darkness.
Or, if we look for a more modern instance, we
may read the FiorettiQi St. Francis of Assisi, than
whom no one has trod nearer to the footsteps of
Christ. The parables and poems of St. Francis
218 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
are all aglow with passionate joy and tenderness
and beauty.
I do not mean that sorrow and denunciation are
banished from the teaching of Christ. But the
sorrow of Christ is not the uncharitable cry alone
of one whose spirit has been wounded by seeing
wrong and injustice in the world. Does it need a
prophet to tell us the times are out of joint? Nor
is it the anguish of a spirit that has retreated bit-
terly upon itself because the world does not re-
spond to his own personal demands. It is rather
the brooding pity of one who sees that the fashion
of this world passeth away, and that rich and poor
alike are in the bondage of sin. There is in him
neither the rancor of class hatred nor the wail of
personal disillusion. The world is dark to him
because it lies outside the great and wonderful
radiance of the kingdom of heaven. If I read
aright the fragmentary record of Christ's life it
was more filled with the joy of spiritual insight
than with the bitterness of earthly despair.
And this is not the nature of Christianity alone,
but of true faith wherever found. We hear much
of the pessimism of Buddha, and Schopenhauer is
supposed to have sucked thence the poison of his
philosophy; but in reality the doctrine of Buddha
in its pure form is one of unspeakable gladness.
He dwelt much on the transitory nature of this
world and on the misery of human life, but he
dwelt far more on the ineffable peace and joy of
deliverance. There is the pessimism of one whose
TOLSTOY 219
vision is wholly downward, and who sees only
the bleakness of earthly life; there is another so-
called pessimism of one whose vision is ever up-
ward, and to whom, therefore, the world seems a
clog on his progress toward perfect happiness, and
such, if it be pessimism at all, is the pessimism of
Buddha. Only a reader familiar with the Buddh-
ist books can have any notion of the overwhelm-
ing spirit of gladness and simple charity that
pervades them. There is in one of them the story
of a prince who is converted and leaves the luxury
of a palace to join the brotherhood; and we are
told that in the night-time the brothers heard him
walking outside in the grove and crying to him-
self, A ho ! Afa^f for his joy was so great that he
couldTnot sleep.
In a word, the sadness of true religion is nega-
tive, the joy positive. Faith is the deliberate
turning of the eye from darkness to light. If the
words of the preacher close the doors in our breasts
and bring to us a contracted feeling of depression,
we may know that his denunciation of the world
is because the world has turned to ashes in his
mouth and not because he has attained to any
true vision of the peace of the spirit.
It is because there is no note of spiritual joy in
Tolstoy when he speaks from his own heart and
lays aside the borrowed jargon of Christianity,
it is because there is in him only the bitterness
of a great and smitten soul, it is because there
is in him no charity or tenderness, but only the
22O SHELBURNE ESSAYS
bleakness of disillusion, that he must be counted
in the end an enemy to faith and not an upbuilder
of faith.
I have dwelt thus at length on Tolstoy's theory
of the new art and on his religion of humanitari-
anism from which this theory springs rather than
on his practice of art as shown in the novel Resur-
rection, because his theoretic writing seemed to me
more fruitful and suggestive, and because let me
confess it the novel has awakened in my mind a
repugnance strongly at variance with the eulo-
gistic reception it has gained at large. There is
undoubtedly superabundant force in the book;
there is the visual power, so common in Russian
novels, which compels the reader to see with his
own eyes what the author describes; there is
profound skill of characterisation, clothing the
persons of the story in flesh and blood; but with
all this, what have we in the end but * * the ex-
pense of spirit in a waste of shame " ?
It would be an easy task to point out how per-
fectly the novel follows the author's theory, and
how completely it presents him as a decadent
with the humanitarian superimposed. There is
the same utter inability to perceive beauty as con-
nected with a healthy ideal of character, and a
consequent repudiation of beauty altogether.
There is the same morbid brooding on sex which
lent so unsavoury a reputation to the Kreutzer
Sonata. It should seem that the author's mind
had dwelt so persistently and intensely on this
TOLSTOY 221
subject as to induce a sort of erotic mania taking
the form at once of a horrid attraction and repul-
sion. We are sickened in the same way with end-
less details of loathsome description that are made
only the more repellent by their vividness; nor
can I see how the fascination of such scenes as
the trial and the prison can be based on any
worthier motive than that which collects a crowd
about some hideous accident of the street. It is
not science, for it is touched with morbid emo-
tionalism. It is not true art, for it contains no
element of elevation. It is not right preaching,
for it degrades human nature without awakening
any compensating spiritual aspiration. It is,
when all has been said, the same spirit of unclean
decadence as that which led Baudelaire to write
his stanzas on Une Charogne, and it classes Tol-
stoy in many respects with that corrupt school
which he so heartily detested. The travesty of
life presented in the book may be explained I do
not know by the barbarous state of Russian
civilisation. The coarseness of details, however,
may well be charged to the individual mind of the
man who while describing in his memoirs the
burial of his own mother dilates on the odour of
the body. This is not a pleasant fact to mention,
but is in itself worth a volume of argument.
Christianity was thrust upon the Northern hea-
then at the point of sword and pike: it should seem
as if this propagator of humanitarianism was bent
on making converts by trampling under foot all
222 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
the finer feelings and fairer instincts, all the de-
corum and suavity, of human nature.
Such, at present is the most notable phase of
the ancient feud, so far at least as it concerns lit-
erature; and from the horns of this dilemma the
mockery of art for art's sake on one side, and on
the other the dubious and negative virtue of the
humanitarians I find no way of escape, unless
the world discovers again some positive ideal
which beauty can serve. And if you say that this
conflict is only one phase of an ever changing and
never solved antinomy of human nature, and that
the conception of the good and beautiful was an
empty word of the philosophers, certainly I shall
not attempt to answer in terms of logic, for I my-
self have been too long haunted by a similar
doubt. And yet I seem to see dimly and figura-
tively the shadow of a solution. Call it a dream
if you will; but what else was the vision of Jacob
when he lay asleep and beheld a ladder stretching
from the earth to the sky? or the journey of
Dante up the Mountain of Purgatory and from
planet to planet? or Dionysius's doctrine of the
hierarchy of angels and principalities and powers
reaching in unbroken succession from man to the
Supreme Being ?
Somewhere in that same visionary land I beheld
a great mountain, whose foot was in a valley of
eternal shadows, and whose head was lost in the
splendour of the pure empyrean. At first the eye
was bewildered and could see only the strange
TOLSTOY 523
contrast of the gloom below and the whiteness
above; but as I looked longer, I discerned a path
that stretched from one to the other up the whole
length of the slope, uniting them by gradual
changes of light and shade. On this pathway
were countless human souls, some toiling up-
ward, others lightly descending, but none paus-
ing, for there seemed to be at work within them
some principle of unrest which forever impelled
them this way or that. And their journey was a
strange and mystic pilgrimage, through ever
varying scenes, between the deep abyss far below,
where monstrous creatures like the first uncertain
births of Chaos wallowed in the slime and dark-
ness, and high above the regions made dim with
excess of light, where in the full noonday figures-
of transcendent glory seemed to move. And I
saw that of all the pilgrims a few lifted their eyes
aloft to the great white light, and were so rav-
ished by its radiance that the objects before their
feet were as if they did not exist. And of these
few one here and there pressed on valiantly and in
time was himself rapt from view into the upper
radiance; but the others were blinded by the light,
and lost their foothold, and were hurled headlong
into the loathsome valley. And I saw a few others
whose eyes turned by some horrid fascination to
the abyss itself, and thither they rushed madly,
heedless of every allurement by the way. But
by far the greater number kept their regard
fixed modestly on the path just above or below,
224 SttELBURNE ESSAYS
according as the spirit within led them to ascend or
descend. And these seemed to walk ever in a kind
of earthly paradise; for the light, streaming down
from the empyrean and tempered to their vision
by wont, fell upon the trees by the roadside and
on the flowering shrubs innumerable and on the
mountain brooks, and gilded all with wonderful
and inexpressible beauty. And those that gazed
above were filled with such joy at the fresh world
before them that they climbed ever upward and
never rested, for always some scene still fairer
lured them on. And as they climbed, the light
grew brighter and more clear, and the path more
beautiful and easier to ascend, and so without
seeming toil or peril they too passed from sight.
But those others who cast their eyes on the path-
way below were drawn in the same way by the
beauty of the scene where the golden light glanced
on the trees; and with much ease and satisfaction
to themselves they paced down and still down-
ward, following the shifting vision and dallying
with pleasure on the way, and never observed how
the light was growing dimmer and the road more
precipitous, until losing balance they were thrown
headlong into the noisome valley.
So the division and conflict of human nature
appeared to me in a parable; but whether the
vision had any meaning or was only an idle fancy,
1 do not know.
THE RELIGIOUS GROUND OF HUMANI-
TARIANISM
No writer of the present day has discussed the
intricate problem of social evolution more logically
than Mr. Mallock, and even his enemies will ad-
mit that his Aristocracy and Evolution presents a
strong plea in favour of the so-called * ' great-man
theory ' ' against the claims of socialism and of
those theories generally that would sink the indi-
vidual in the mass. Mr. Mattock's argument, re-
duced to the briefest terms, is simply this: Social
science attempts to answer two distinct sets of
questions; and one set namely, the speculative
it has answered with great success; it has failed
only in attempting to answer practical questions.
The phenomena with which it has dealt suc-
cessfully are phenomena of social aggregates con-
sidered as wholes; but the practical problems of
to-day, with which it has dealt unsuccessfully,
arise out of the conflict between different parts of
the same aggregate. Social science has failed as
a practical guide because it has not recognised
this distinction. The conflict between the parts
of an aggregate arises from inequalities of posi-
tion. These social inequalities are partly due to
15
225
226 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
circumstances; but most people will admit that
congenital inequalities in talent have much to do
with these social inequalities. The condemnation
of the great-man theory is a removal of all con-
genital inequalities from the field of study. It
may be asked what place the great man has in an
exclusively evolutionary theory of progress. The
reply is that the fittest survivor is not the same as
the great man. He plays a part in progress,
but not the same part. The fittest men, by sur-
viving, raise the general level of the race and
promote progress in this way. The great man
promotes progress by being superior to his co-
temporaries. The movement of progress is
double; one movement being very slow, the other
rapid. The survival of the fittest causes the slow
movement; the rapid movement is caused by the
great man. Mr. Mallock's argument then pro-
ceeds to show how the great man that is, the
man of exceptional abilities in any one field, often
a very narrow field working through the law of
competition renders the labour of the masses more
efficient by his directive power, and thus increases
the general well-being. And the only possible
incentive to induce the great man to enter into
this arena of material competition is the material
rewards such as he now receives in the world.
It is of course a manifest injustice to condense
the argument of a large volume, with all its
wealth of illustration and rebuttal, to the limits
of a paragraph; but such an act may be justified
HUMANITARIANISM 227
in the present case because our purpose is to at-
tempt neither the refutation nor the support of
socialism on economic grounds, but to examine
the question from quite a different point of view.
To our mind Mr. Mallock's theory is correct so
far as it goes, and we presume that most persons
of intelligence will admit the strength of his
reasoning if only economic grounds are considered
and, what is more important, if only the competi-
tive side of human nature is taken into account.
But just here we see the weak point of his argu-
ment. A person may well retort: Mr. Mallock's
theory, as you maintain, is true so far as it goes;
but it professedly touches only the worldly and
materialistic element of human nature. The law
of competition will necessarily produce such a
state of society as he describes; but the law of
competition, while perfectly valid in the lower
stages of civilisation, takes no account of what
may be called the religious or humanitarian in-
stinct of man; and it is just this higher instinct
which introduces a new factor into human pro-
gress and makes possible the claims of socialism.
I say * ' religious or humanitarian instinct ' ' pur-
posely, for it must be perfectly clear to any one
who looks abroad that religion to-day, so far as it
is a vital force, has very little to do with the sal-
vation of individual souls and very much to do
with the regeneration of society as an organised
body. The brotherhood of man is the real re-
ligious dogma of the times. We wish to consider
228 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
briefly the force of this religious ground of social-
ism, we should rather say humanitarianism, for
our concern is not with the specific political pro-
gramme of the socialists, properly so-called, but
with that ever-growing belief in the equality and
brotherhood of man which is equally responsible
for the nihilism of Tolstoy and the collectivism
of Karl Marx. If these claims are found to be
empty, it should seem that there remains for us
only to put away our dream of a regenerated so-
ciety and of universal happiness, and to make the
best of the old order of things where justice seems
to our blinded vision to walk hand in hand with
the unequal fates.
And first of all it is necessary to examine more
carefully what is meant by the religious instinct
and to separate it from misleading overgrowths;
for evidently Christianity to confine ourselves
for the moment to that form of belief as taught
and practised to-day is a mingling of the religious
instinct with worldly policy. We mean nothing
invidious by worldly policy; but simply that the
religion of Christ, as it spread and became a
factor of civilisation, necessarily assumed a formal
policy and government that it became a Church.
Neither in its Catholic nor in its Protestant form
has the Church lent itself to any promulgation or
protection of socialistic ideas of equality; and for
this reason the organised Church has been bit-
terly attacked by Socialists and social reformers
generally most bitterly of all perhaps by Tolstoy,
HUMANITARIANISM 22Q
who finds in it the ultimate cause of the wide-
spread misery which the new acceptance of hu-
man brotherhood is to annul. Indeed many
Christians and among them Tolstoy assert that
the organised Church stands in direct opposition
to the plain teaching of Jesus, and that the chief
need of the world to-day is to throw off these
outer trappings of worldliness and to approach
once more the original message of the Gospel.
We are compelled, then, to disregard the policy
of the Church, whether Catholic or Protestant,
and to turn back to the pure voice of religion,
which in the words of the great prophets appeals
more or less authoritatively to the hearts of all
men; for here, if anywhere, lies the only valid
basis of that much-vaunted regenerating belief in
the brotherhood and equality of men. There can
certainly be no surer and clearer way of discover-
ing the oracles of this pure religion than by going
to the words and example of Christ himself. For
the Christian this will be sufficient; for those of
more questioning mind it may be proper to rein-
force the teaching of Christ with the doctrine of
Buddha. He would be a rash man who should
seek the mandates of religion outside of the realm
in which these two greatest apostles of the West
and of the Bast stand in concord.
At the outset of any attempt to discover the
actual doctrine of Christ we are, however, met by
a difficulty which must be frankly confessed and
set down for whatever weight it may have. Only
230 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
those who have gone to the Gospels without any
preconvictions of what they were to find know
how hard it is to discover the real position of
Christ. Single texts may be quoted, and indeed
have been quoted, to justify every variety of
creed; and I can see no way through the diffi-
culties except to form an opinion from the general
consensus of Christ's acts and words.
It will help us if we discriminate among the
various elements of religion that enter into Chris-
tianity. Thus there is one phase of Christianity
which may be called the purely spiritual and
which it possesses with all higher cults. This
phase cannot better be expressed than in the
three words of St. Paul, Faith, Hope, and Love.
We are not here dealing with faith in a peculiar
dogma or person which may vary with varying
creeds, but with that faculty of the mind or soul
which turns instinctively to the things of the
spirit. And so in regard to hope, we mean simply
a state of joyous trust that somehow to the faith-
ful all things in the end shall be good. And in
love we refer to no specific commands, but to that
sympathetic attitude of the observing soul which
is ready to accept and make a portion of its own
life the joys and sorrows of the world. It is at
bottom the desire of the soul to become one with
all it perceives akin to itself. These three form
the spiritual basis of all religion; and it is not
necessary to say how abundantly they are held
forth in the Gospels. But faith, hope, and love,
HUMANITARIANISM 2$ I
in this spiritual sense, have no direct bearing on
the social question we are here considering. They
are the fountainhead of Christianity, as of every
religion, and flow down through all its manifesta-
tions; but they are of the spirit and not of this
world. Kven love, which at first might seem
corroborative of humanitarian equality and is no
doubt so interpreted, is in this spiritual sense a
state of mind, not a rule of action. To do what
is best for our neighbour, we must first be told
what is best for him. And besides it applies as
much to our feeling toward the dumb beasts as to
our fellow-men.
And so at the other end of Christianity there
lies a law which is common practically to human-
ity and which has no bearing on the question at
issue. This is that universal code of prohibitive
morality found in the Decalogue and in large part
repeated and reinforced by Christ : Thou shalt not
kill, Thou shalt not steal, etc.
But between these two extremes of spiritual
outreaching and negative morality lies a common
ground where the two orders meet together and
produce a body of positive or spiritual morality
which bears directly on constructive sociology.
It is this ground that we are to investigate more
narrowly in the doctrine of Christ.
If we turn to the Sermon on the Mount, which
surely represents the teaching of Christ in its
purest form, we are met in the beginning by
the promulgation of a virtue distinctly medial in
232 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
character between the aspirations of the spirit and
the prohibitions of the flesh. This is that virtue
of humility so often enounced by Christ and so
strikingly exhibited in his own life: Blessed are
the poor in spirit; Blessed are they that mourn;
Blessed are the meek! It would be quite super-
fluous to dwell at length on this teaching of the
Son of Man, who came not to be ministered unto
but to minister, and who suffered voluntarily the
humiliation of the cross. He never ceased to de-
clare that he who would save his life should lose
it, and that he who would be first should be last.
Probably the one feature that most radically dis-
tinguishes Christianity from other religions is this
peculiar emphasis and reiteration of the lesson of
humility. Something very much akin to it in its
results may be found elsewhere, notably in Buddh-
ism as we shall see; but nowhere else has the
high formulative virtue just the same mark of
personal poignancy which is felt in Christian
humility.
Closely related to humility and following it as
an immediate corollary is that other virtue of non-
resistance. Count Tolstoy in one of his powerful
but unbalanced lay sermons tells us how a learned
Jew, with whom he was discussing, traced every
precept of Christianity back to Hebrew traditions
except this one precept of non-resistance; and it
is known that Tolstoy himself would build upon
this rock the whole fabric of his reform. Such
an attitude is doubtless the extravagance of a
HUMANITARIANISM 233
fanatical mind and further contains within itself
as I shall attempt to prove the mischievous error
of assuming as a universal law what was meant to
be a rule for an elect few. Yet I cannot see how
any candid inquirer can study the words and life
of Christ without acknowledging that the precept
of non-resistance was intended to be taken literally
and absolutely by those to whom it was given.
Blessed are the peace-makers, he says, and blessed
are they which are persecuted for righteousness'
sake. And again, in the same discourse, he
enounces the rule with careful precision: " Resist
not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy
right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if
any man will sue thee at law, and take away thy
coat, let him have thy cloak also." This virtue
of non-resistance is no more than the essential
and inevitable flower of that humility which so
distinguishes Christianity. And throughout those
last days of trial and humiliation the Saviour
never once offered the least resistance to his
persecutors.
Not far removed in character from non-resistance,
and like it consequent on the doctrine of humility,
stands the ideal of perfect poverty. Here at once
we enter upon ground that trenches on socio-
logical questions, and unfortunately no statement
can be made quite so categorical as in the case of
humility and non-resistance. Yet again a candid
consideration of the preaching and example of
Christ must, I think, lead to the conclusion that
234 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
he wished his disciples to eschew the possession
of all property including even what we should call
the necessaries of life. ' ' Where your treasure is,
there will your heart be also," he declared, and
seemed to feel that the pursuit of the kingdom of
heaven was too urgent to admit even the least
temporising with the interests of this world; for
ye cannot serve God and mammon. So when he
sent forth his disciples to preach, he bade them
take neither gold nor scrip for their journey, nor
two coats. And in the case of the rich young
man whom Jesus loved, the last command was to
sell all that he had and to separate himself from
the world. However repugnant to modern no-
tions this rule of absolute poverty may be, yet it
certainly contains an element of real beauty.
" Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for
your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall
drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put
on;" and thereupon follows that most exquisite
parable of the fowls of the air and the lilies of the
field, which has lingered on through Christian art
and poetry. ' ' Take therefore no thought for the
morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for
the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the
evil thereof." And despite the abuses which
arose in the begging orders from their pretensions
to follow this rule of poverty, the precept did now
and then bring forth the highest and purest
type of Christian character. Search the annals of
the Church and you will find no one who walked
HUMANITARIANISM 235
nearer than St. Francis of Assisi to the supreme
model of holy living. Protestant and Catholic
alike must admit this ; and poverty with St.
Francis was a passion no less exigent for spiritual
growth than humility and chastity; and the fol-
lowing of this austere law created in him that same
saintly joy and that same exquisite beauty of sym-
pathy with all sentient beings of which we catch
glimpses in the story of Jesus.
The name of St. Francis brings us to the last
and in some respects most important of those vir-
tues which lie between the aspirations of pure
spirituality and the commands of prohibitive
morality, I mean the much disputed virtue of
chastity. I have heard one who was both a man
of the world and a philosopher avow that self-re-
spect and a regard for happiness in the higher
sense of the word might provoke in the heart
every renunciation except this one habit of chas-
tity. That is merely to say that chastity,
considered as a law which regulates the very
imaginations of the heart, is something more
than a mere prohibition; it is a supplanting of the
earthly life by the desires and aspirations of the
spirit. There is no doubt that the Church from
a very early age looked upon chastity as the
crowning glory of the religious life; even St. Paul
seems to have regarded it as a desirable, but not
always possible, state for those who dedicated
themselves to holiness. I am willing to admit,
however, that the position of Christ himself in the
236 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
matter is open to some ambiguity. I remember
his action at the marriage feast of Cana, and again
his saying, always so solemnly repeated at mar-
riages to-day: " What therefore God hath joined
together, let not man put asunder." Yet it is
probable that this was no more than a concession
to the world, a hesitancy to push matters spiritual
into regions where they do not belong, the appeal
of charity pleading for the beauty and innocence
of a life which in his austerer moments he reso-
lutely condemned. For herein lies the burning
question of religion and the world. If, as the
deeper voice of inspiration proclaims within us
when the breast is calm, this earthly existence is
a station of groaning and travailling, then the one
purpose of religion is to lift us out of the world
altogether, and the allurement of love is the last
snare to be avoided, the last illusion to be dissi-
pated, the more perilous because of its mask of
beauty. As for Christ it is at least apparent that
he regarded chastity as the simplest and best state
for those who were to be his immediate followers.
He himself did not always abstain from the pleas-
ures of life and men accused him of being a wine-
bibber and a glutton ; yet he thought it necessary
for his mission to abjure all family bonds. When
these ties were pressed upon him, he replied
sternly : ' ' Who is my mother ? and who are my
brethren?" And to his disciples he said: " If
any man come to me, and hate not his father, and
mother . . . yea, and his own life also, he
HUMANITARIANISM 237
cannot be my disciple. ' ' So far, however, chastity
may be set down as a mere matter of expediency
more or less urgent upon those who were to give
themselves up to the exigencies of a missionary
career; but it is possible, I think, to go further
than that and to say that Christ looked upon
chastity as the last act of spiritual faith or dominion
in the religious path. His various words on the
relation of the sexes seem to imply this thought
as their deeper content. In one case he is re-
ported to have spoken more explicitly: "There
be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs
for the kingdom of heaven's sake; " and again he
declared that * ' in the resurrection they neither
marry nor are given in marriage." Such state-
ments as these, though isolated in the Gospels,
when taken with the general tendency of Christ's
teaching and with the wide and early doctrine of
the Church, have considerable weight; and if in
addition to this we consider the experience of men
throughout the world who have sought the inner
sanctuary of holiness, the law may be accepted, I
think, as final.
In these four virtues (or three, if we choose to
omit chastity) is contained the strictly religious
or spiritual teaching of Christ as it bears on the
social aspect of life. The law of love, which
might at first seem to demand inclusion, is in
reality something much deeper and wider than
these social virtues. It is akin to the power of
faith and hope which seizes upon spiritual things;
238 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
it is a state of the soul and only by extension is
concerned with our individual life among men.
To reach the source and home of this pure virtue
of love we must, as Emerson wrote, mount above
the bonds of earthly life
Into vision where all form
In one only form dissolves;
In a region where the wheel
On which all beings ride
Visibly revolves;
Where the starred, eternal worm
Girds the world with bound and term;
Where unlike things are like;
Where good and ill,
And joy and moan,
Melt into one.
It is, to be sure, this high charity, to use its older
name, that pervades the four religious virtues,
giving them their tone and beauty, and binding
them to the spiritual life; it is the essence even of
the prohibitive law; but it is not specific in any
such sense as humility, poverty, non-resistance,
and chastity are specific.
We may be confirmed in accepting these virtues
as the cardinal doctrine of Christ who to the
Western world stands as the inspired exemplar of
the religious instinct, by turning for a moment
to the great prophet of the Orient. I have not
the desire to examine here in much detail the
Buddhistic doctrine. Nor is such an examination
necessary; for, whether we regard Buddhism as
HUMANITARIANISM 239
the equal or the inferior of Christianity, it at least
has the good fortune of presenting to us in the
Pali books a more consistent and more amply
logical body of dogma than the Gospels. This is
chiefly due to the fact that Buddhism appeals
more to the reason and less to the emotions than
Christianity.
We may pass over the Buddhistic conception of
faith, hope, and love, with the remark that they
are as essential there as in Christianity, though
of course somewhat different in tone. Nor need
we discuss the prohibitive commands of Buddhism
which are substantially the same as the Jewish.
To his closer followers (who were organised by him
into something like the monastic order) Buddha
taught a system of higher morality which, so far
at least as it bears on social relations, was strik-
ingly like that of Christ.
Humility, to be sure, in the precise Christian
sense of the word cannot be called a Hindu idea;
yet the starting-point of Buddhism depends on a
state of mind not entirely dissimilar to it. Chris-
tian humility is associated with a feeling of self-
debasement of the sinful soul standing before a
perfectly righteous judge who rewards and con-
demns as one man judges another. This peculi-
arly emotional quality Buddhistic renunciation
does not possess, for the simple reason that the
Buddhist acknowledges no personal and eternal
God. But in one respect the two forms of renun-
ciation approach each other. The self- debasement
240 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
of the Christian was for the purpose of receiving
finally a crown of glory; it was a putting away
of the lower nature, of the old Adam within the
breast, that the higher nature might grow and, in
accordance with mystic views early developed in
the Church, be absorbed in the perfect holiness of
Christ. Take out of this the relation of the soul
to a personal Saviour, and the Buddhist conception
of humility, or self-abnegation, is obtained. In one
of the Pali books Buddha distinguishes between
the cravings of the lower and higher natures
in a manner that throws light on this similarity.
There 1 are two cravings, O priests; the noble one,
and the ignoble one. And what, O priests, is the ignoble
craving ? We may have, O priests, the case of one who,
himself subject to birth, craves what is subject to birth;
himself subject to old age, craves what is subject to old
age; himself subject to disease, . . . death, . . .
sorrow, . . . corruption, . . . craves what is
subject to corruption. . . . And what, O priests,
is the noble craving ? We may have, O priests, the case
of one who, himself subject to birth, perceives the
wretchedness of what is subject to birth, and craves the
incomparable security of a Nirvana free from birth;
himself subject to old age, . . . disease, . . .
death, . . . sorrow, . . . corruption, perceives the
wretchedness of what is subject to corruption, and craves
the incomparable security of a Nirvana free from cor-
ruption.
Here lies the gist of the matter. The fashion
of this world passeth away; what is born must
1 Translated by Henry C. Warren.
HUMANITARIANISM
perish; all things are impermanent, and most im-
permanent of all is that peculiar combination of
desires and repulsions which we call a man's per-
sonal soul. He who would obtain salvation,
according to Hindu ideas, must deliberately put
away the personal self and look for a state of peace
and deliverance surpassing in joy the conception
of heavenly rewards:
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
It is unfortunate (for us at least of the Western
world who would approach Buddhism intelli-
gently) that the name of this condition of salva-
tion, the word "Nirvana," should contain only
the negative idea of the snuffing out of the lower
cravings as a candle flame is blown out, and
should omit the positive idea of joy which for the
true Buddhist this state signifies. If the word is
negative, that is merely because the positive
aspect of deliverance cannot be expressed in
rational language. The identity of Nirvana with
nihilism is a fatuity strongly condemned by
Buddha himself. In relation to the higher crav-
ing of the heart this self-abnegation of the Buddh-
ist is then not unlike Christian humility. Nor
is its bearing on the social life of man much differ-
ent from that of its Christian congener; they both
lead to a contempt for the conflict of worldly
16
242 SttELBtiRNtf ESSAYS
ambitions, and to a certain self-withdrawal before
the impertinent demands of society.
It is easy therefore to see how the virtues fol-
lowing such a guidance should be ascetic in their
nature. Non-resistance in Buddhism was ex-
tended to the forbidding of all violence whatso-
ever, and life even of the lowest orders was held
sacred. There are many stories in the Pali books
setting forth the beauty of absolute submission to
violence and malice. One well-known stanza in
which the idea of non-resistance is fully expressed,
it may not be amiss to quote here. " ' He has
abused me, he has struck me, he has oppressed
me, he has robbed me,' those who harbour such
thoughts fail to put an end to enmity. ' He has
abused me, he has struck me, he has oppressed
me, he has robbed me,' those who do not har-
bour such thoughts, they put an end to enmity."
Strict poverty also was enjoined. The disciple
was allowed only eight possessions: an alms-bowl,
razor, needle, belt, water-strainer, and three robes.
Neither the community nor the individual monk
could own money, and food was obtained only by
begging. Absolute chastity was prescribed, and
all family ties were severed in order that no im-
pediment might remain in the path of enlighten-
ment.
Despite some difference of emotional tone the
religious codes of Christ and Buddha, as they
touch on vital social questions, are thus seen to
be in unison; and where these two leaders of the
HUMANITARIANISM 43
West and of the East agree so perfectly, I am
content to believe that the religious instinct has
been voiced in its greatest purity. What then
shall we say to those who in the specific gospel of
Christ seek to find a law that shall supplant the
long-established laws of society ? Or to those
who hear in the warning voice of the religious
instinct a power that shall set some theory of hu-
manitarian equality in place of the old evolutional
reign of competition ? The doctrines of Christ if
accepted by the world in their integrity, the
virtues, that is, of humility, non-resistance, and
poverty, would not institute any such desired
revolution in society; they would simply make an
end of the whole social fabric; and if to these
chastity be added, they would do away with
human existence altogether. As a matter of fact
Christ, according to the overwhelming evidence
of the Gospels, never for a moment contemplated
the introduction of a religion which should rebuild
society. His kingdom was not of this world, and ^
there is every reason to believe that he looked to /)
see only a few chosen souls follow in his footsteps. )
He declares of himself that he was sent only to
the lost sheep of the house of Israel; and when he
sent forth the twelve, he commanded them to go
not into the way of the Gentiles and not to enter
any city of the Samaritans. The world at large
was to him a wicked and adulterous generation,
moving toward the consummation of its sin; " for
wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth
244 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
to destruction, and many there be which go in
thereat." Out of this habitation of wickedness
he called his disciples to leave their nets or their
seat at the receipt of custom, and to abandon (if
necessary even to hate) father and mother arid
every earthly tie; they were to leave all and make
themselves ready for the kingdom of heaven. We
are told, you reply, that he bade his disciples to
go into all the world and preach the Gospel.
This is true, but the words are so manifestly in
disaccord with the whole tenor of Christ's life and
teaching that the passage may be strongly sus-
pected to be of later origin. And, granting that
the words are authentic, they still detract nothing
from the present argument; for in the Gospel of
Matthew where the same command is repeated
there follows immediately that lurid account of
the sin and desolation of the world whose ruin is
only delayed until the unheeded Gospel has been
carried abroad. Although this particular picture
of the final catastrophe is in the record inextricably
confused with an ex-post-facto prophecy of the fall
of Jerusalem, yet there can be little doubt, from
tradition and from the early and universal belief
of the Church, that Christ looked for the speedy
destruction of the world. Out of the consumma-
tion of wickedness which was to call down a gen-
eral curse on the race, some few faithful believers,
like Noah and his family at the time of the Flood,
were to be saved and gathered into the kingdom
of heaven. The prophecy is quite clear, however
HUMANITARIANISM 245
much prejudice may have sought to pervert its
meaning: " Verily I say unto you, That there be
some of them that stand here, which shall not
taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of
God come into power." He nowhere intimates
that the law and custom of the world can be
changed; he accepts these things as necessary to
the social system. He rebukes the Pharisees for
their hypocrisy in religion, but never speaks
against the power of civil authority. ' * Ye know, ' '
he says, ' ' that they which are accounted to rule
over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them;
and their great ones exercise authority upon
them. But so shall it not be among you: but
whosoever will be great among you, shall be your
minister (i. e. , servant). ' ' Not a word falls from
his lips to indicate that slavery should be abol-
ished, or the hierarchy of government disturbed.
When the disciples question him about the paying
of taxes, he bids them pay what is demanded, not
because they themselves are in any way a part of
the civil order, but because he is unwilling to give
offence. And again when tempted by the Phari-
sees he replies in those ringing words: " Render
to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God
the things that are God's." There is something
of peculiar pathos in the story of the rich young
man whom Jesus loved and to whom he pointed
out more clearly than to any other this fixed gulf
between the ideals of the world and of religion.
All the virtues of the world the zealous inquirer
246 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
had observed, yet one thing was wanting; and
still to-day as we read the story we can almost
hear the reluctance and pity in Jesus' voice, as he
bade the young man look to another and sterner
law of renunciation if he would be perfect. The
gist of the whole matter is contained in those two
pithy sayings: My kingdom is not of this world,
and, Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
In this point again we find Buddhism and
Christianity in accord, except that what is ex-
pressed in the Gospels more or less vaguely is in
the Pdli books ordained with rigorous precision.
The believers in India were divided into two dis-
tinct classes: those who formed the sanga^ or
church property speaking, and who, looking to
Nirvana as their goal, accepted the religious life
as we have described it; and those who acknow-
ledged the higher ideal but chose rather to seek
their reward in a heaven of prolonged but not
eternal happiness. These latter remained in the
world as merchants or soldiers or rulers, and their
adherence to the faith was particularly marked by
ddna, or liberal giving, a virtue of supreme im-
portance where the true disciples depended entirely
on charity for their support. Buddha, even more
clearly than Christ, recognised and taught the
evil and insufficiency of human society; and he
saw also, as did Christ, that the religious instinct,
if followed out, must result in the utter abrogation
of that society and not in any practical alteration
of its laws.
HUMANITARIANISM
247
Yet because the religious inspiration and virtues
avert their face from this world, it does not follow
that the law of competition reigns among men
without restriction or alleviation, or that human
society is left wholly to the ravening of wolfish
and tigerish desires. The world has its code of
ethics as well as the spirit. First of all the pro-
hibitive commands are universally binding: Thou
shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, etc. And far
above these stands the guiding principle of char-
acter, corresponding to the aspiration of the spirit
but concerned with that lower personality which
buys and sells, marries and gives in marriage, and
looks to earthly success as its reward. And this
principle of character shows itself under three
manifestations in the same way as the law of the
spirit. As faith is the act of discriminating be-
tween the things of the body and the things of
the spirit, so prudence, or worldly wisdom, (the
Platonic ffocpia would better convey the mean-
ing,) is the faculty of discerning the relative
values of the things of this earth. As hope is
the joy and persistence of faith, so courage is
that which leads a man to follow diligently the
dictates of prudence; it is the joy and strength of
secular activity, for no man without courage ever
won the prize of success, or winning it held it in
gladness. And as love is the flower of faith and
hope, the faculty of the spirit that reaches down
and gives vitality to the religious virtues, so
honour is the flower of prudence and courage, the
248 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
guiding principle through the intricate demands
of worldly uprightness.
Now these three prudence, courage, and
honour, like their spiritual congeners, are not
specific virtues touching the relation of man to
man, but affect rather the integrity of a man's
character itself. Between these and the prohibi-
tive commands lie the social virtues of the secular
life, which are curiously similar to the religious
virtues, yet perfectly distinct from them. In place
of humility, or self-abnegation, which abjures the
desires and contentions of life altogether, stands
justice in its stricter acceptance, justice which
implies the wish to attain for oneself and to allow
to all others what the ability and energy and in-
dustry of each merit. For non-resistance we have
the civil virtue of mercy, which does not abrogate
justice or claim for the weak what is due to the
strong, but softens its asperities by recognising
that after all human judgment is liable to err and
that where doubts arise it is magnanimous to sur-
render somewhat to the less fortunate. It is,
strictly considered, an extension of justice as non-
resistance is an extension of humility. So in
place of poverty we should have charity in its
limited sense of liberal giving; and in place of
chastity, temperance and faithfulness. These
four justice, mercy, charity, and temperance
are positive in their effect and supplement the
mere prohibitions of universal morality; but they
are not religious and they do not spring from the
HUMANITARIANISM 249
religious instinct, neither do they in any sense
controvert, however much they may mitigate, the
law of competition which governs the material
world.
By right or wrong,
Lands and goods go to the strong.
Property will brutely draw
Still to the proprietor;
Silver to silver creep and wind,
And kind to kind.
They are, in brief, the logical working out of that
precept of Apollo, Nothing too much, which as de-
veloped by Aristotle and others has always been
and must always remain the acting rule of human
society. If, in distinction to this command of
Apollo, we should wish to express briefly the ideal
of religious virtue, we could not do better than
repeat the words of the Imitation : ' ' Tene breve
et consummatum verbum: Dimitte omnia, et in-
venies omnia; relinque cupidinem, et reperies re-
quiem," Put away all things and thou shalt find
all things, abandon desire and thou shalt attain
peace.
If you ask whence arises the widespread belief
that the old order of things is to pass away and a
new reign of humanitarianism to be introduced,
the answer is ready to hand: it arises from that
inexhaustible source of error, the failure to dis-
cern distinctions. It is the good fortune of Mr.
Mallock to have set forth the nature of this
250 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
confusion of socialistic ideas in the economic field.
He has discriminated clearly between the phe-
nomena of social aggregates considered as wholes
on the one hand, and on the other hand the prob-
lems which arise out of the conflict of different
parts within these aggregates. The progress of
mankind as a race is the slow process of evolution
caused by the survival of the fittest; the rapid
progress of any particular aggregate is due to the
directive activity of the "great men " within that
aggregate working through the law of compe-
tition. Justice and the general welfare demand
that the "great man " receive his proper material
reward. The introduction of the idea of humanity
as a whole into problems of this second order has
brought about the wild and mischievous notions
of humanitarian economy now so prevalent. The
laws of society are fixed, and no amount of senti-
mental yearning will alter their nature; although
it may very well create infinite distrust and class-
hatred.
The religious ground of humanitarianism is a
like failure to observe distinctions, a failure here
to discriminate between the ideals of religion and
the ideals of the world. To apply the laws of the
spirit to the activities of this earth is at once a
desecration and denial of religion and a bewilder-
ing and unsettling of the social order. To intrude
the aspirations of faith and hope and the ethics of
the golden rule of love into regions where prudence
and courage and the dictates of honour are su-
HUMANITARIANISM 25 1
preme, is a mischievous folly. Failure to dis-
criminate between the virtues that spring from
these ideals, or any attempt to amalgamate the
religious virtues and the secular virtues, to con-
fuse humility with justice, non-resistance with
mercy, poverty with liberality, chastity with tem-
perance, such blindness is equally absurd and
vastly more dangerous. Humanitarianism is just
this vague sentimentality of a mind that refuses
to distinguish between the golden rule and the
precept of Apollo. There are gross and manifest
evils in the actual working of the law of compe-
tition, no one denies that. But they are to be set
right, if right is possible in this world, by a clearer
understanding and a more faithful observance of
the worldly virtues, and not by the sickly yearn-
ings of sentimentalists. It is still well that we
render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and i
to God the things that are God's.
For society at large the problem is an easy one;
society as a whole has nothing to do with God
and everything to do with Caesar. Indeed, as the
economic fallacy of socialism springs from apply-
ing the laws of humanity as a whole to any par-
ticular aggregate of men; so the religious fallacy
is an application of the problem of the individual
to such an aggregate of men. But for the indi-
vidual, in whose heart the religious instinct mur-
murs and to whom at the same time the voice of
the world may speak with equal weight, the
question is not always so simple. When faith
2$2 SHELBURNE ESSAYS
was strong among men, as it was for example in
the days of St. Francis, he found it not difficult
perhaps to walk bravely in his chosen path. So-
ciety was divided pretty sharply into those who
followed the law of renunciation and those who
followed the law of ambition, and any attempt to
confuse these two laws would have awakened dis-
quiet and condemnation. So it was that for St.
Francis himself, when the vision of peace came,
it was not so hard, we may suppose, to see his
way perfectly clear before him. But in other
days when faith grows a little dull and the all-
levelling power of democracy has brought things
spiritual and things worldly to the same plane,
or so at least it looks to the eyes of men, in such
days the path of the individual is beset with diffi-
culties. The man of the world is troubled at
times by a voice that calls upon him to renounce:
and on the other side it is still harder, if not im-
possible, to follow the religious life in its simplicity
and purity. What shall be said to the troubled
soul in whose confused hearing the voices of the
world and the spirit are mingled, dragging him
now this way and now that ? I know not unless
it be in the quaint metaphor of Emerson, which I
have already quoted in an earlier essay:
One key, one solution to the mysteries of human
condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom
and foreknowledge, exists, the propounding, namely, of
the double consciousness. A man must ride alternately
on the horses of his private and his public nature, as the
HUMAN1TARIANISM
equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from
horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one and
the other foot on the back of the other.
Such a double life he must lead, balancing be-
tween the two laws, but above all things taking
care not to confuse the regions in which these
laws are valid or to lose the distinction between
his public and his private duty. To lose such a
distinction is to fall forthwith into the shadows
of hypocrisy and charlatanry; to maintain it ever
before the inner eye and to judge honestly between
the conflict of claims is the great problem which
is left to the conscience of each man and to him
alone.
END
I- -1
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